Search Results for: writing
I am very much on record with my view that books should be read in-depth, and that skimming is an important strategy out of a broad repertoire of reading heuristics. Although, I’ll admit that after reading “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading” by Adler and Van Doren, my priors have […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 31, 2019
I wrote a previous blog post on how I prepared for my doctoral programme’s comprehensive exams. I did my PhD at The University of British Columbia, in Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada). Their graduate office has a very clearly written set of guidelines for comprehensive exams, but in the end, I strongly believe that it is […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 26, 2019
In a previous blog post, I explained how, after having done all the reading, I plot the literature (yes, by hand and doing mind mapping techniques) and then, based on this map, I write full paragraphs of the literature review. In this short blog post, I reverse my approach, and instead I show how you […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 25, 2019
My conversations on Twitter with Dr. Pat Thomson (The University of Nottingham) are always delightful. Pat is someone I deeply admire for her research and her commitment to graduate students and scholarly collegiality. I have had the fortune of interacting with her on a regular basis and she’s someone whose blog I refer my own […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 24, 2019
This morning, I woke up at 4 am (as I normally do) and started writing. It’s a Saturday, and I really do not like working on weekends nor long hours. However, this week I’ve been putting in 12-16 hour days, just to catch up. It’s the beginning of the semester. This pace won’t be sustainable, […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 24, 2019
Continuing with the series of “challenging questions my students ask”, this is perhaps the one I get from students that I am always wary to respond. “Professor, how do I know which articles I should read in more depth and which ones I should just skim (i.e. do a quick AIC Content Extraction)?”. Well, now. […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 21, 2019
I have been writing a lot for a very long time, and I *still* find myself dreading the process of opening and facing a new document template. The Dreaded Blank Page. For many of us, facing The Dreaded Blank Page is an exercise in self-loathing, frustration and hand-wringing. Even though I write a lot, and […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– August 15, 2019
Every few weeks, somebody asks me for recommendations of books on academic writing, “how to do a PhD”, or research methods. Most of the time, I answer based on what I have available either at home or at my office, or what I can recall from memory. And as I noted in my Twitter thread […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 17, 2019
This fall, I’m going to be teaching my Public Policy Analysis class (as per usual), but I promised the 4 cohorts of our Bachelors in Public Policy that I would give them a few tips on how to read better/faster/absorb the material more easily/in-depth. I had noticed that my blog had fewer resources for undergraduate […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 12, 2019
My undergraduate students often tell me that it’s really hard for them to discern how to read a paper, particularly dense articles written by people with PhDs who often speak in “academiquese”, but that their faculty assign them to read. This frustrates me because I know that there is nothing I can do to change […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 8, 2019
NOTE: This post is aimed both at undergraduate students AND educators. Obviously graduate students can also draw some insights from this post. I’ve always thought that one doesn’t really learn “how to read” until one practices for an extended period of time with a broad range of sources. I think that the biggest challenge we […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– July 7, 2019
While I have read three of the best books in the business on how to write a book (William Germano on how to transform your dissertation into a book, and how to write an academic book that is not your doctoral thesis aka your second book, as well as Rabiner and Fortunato’s guide on how […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– June 27, 2019
I recently wrote a 24-tweet-long thread that summarized some of the life lessons I learned the hard way in the past few months, and thanks to the work of ThreaderApp I am able to summarize them here. I am going to share the core, key lessons I have learned in the past 5 months, in […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 15, 2019
As a qualitative researcher who mentors students in conducting research using these methods in a primarily quantitative institution, it’s hard to do both mentoring theses and teaching them skills if you don’t teach the methods courses (which I couldn’t do even if I wanted to). Therefore, with all the pain in my heart I have […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– May 1, 2019
Two of my quasi-doctoral students (Cesar Alvarez from University of California Los Angeles and Mariana Miguelez from The Ohio State University), have asked me a few times whether I could write a blog post about how to plan a summer. As doctoral students in the United States, their summer is approximately 4 months (from May […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 14, 2019
This is one of the most challenging questions people have ever asked me, because after looking through dozens of journal articles in my Mendeley database, I could not find a lot of them who used Discussion sections. I believe this idea of the Discussion component of an academic journal article (or book chapter, in some […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– April 10, 2019
I did my PhD in Canada, where doctoral dissertation defenses are public, so what I’m going to narrate here is how I prepared for my own defense under the rules and standards of the school where I graduated from (The University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada). I won’t cover other systems as I don’t […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 13, 2019
This morning, as I was reflecting on a topic I’ve been mulling over (what does Joli Jensen mean by “constant contact with a writing project entail”?), I reviewed potential blog posts I could pre-schedule, and realized that there’s one that I give very little play, even though it’s a really good one: my reverse-planning technique […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– March 7, 2019
I have written several Twitter threads about how do what many people call “active reading“: I read, highlight, scribble on the margins, take notes and then store these in digital and analog media. I use highlighting and writing marginalia to engage more deeply with the reading materials I am working with. I’ve also posted here […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 28, 2019
One of the documents that I find is most required not only in job applications for the academic job market, but also generally to assess scholarly contributions is the curriculum vitae (CV). I have designed and re-designed my own academic CV quite a few times, and for the most part, all I did was to […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 23, 2019
I work according to my circadian rhythm, which may be completely different to that of other people. I do wake up at Ungodly In The Morning (4:00am, or 4:30 when I’m a bit tired, or 6:00 am on weekends – for my reasoning for doing this, you can read this blog post), and obviously by […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– February 1, 2019
I have the hardest time saying NO. While I am an incredibly busy person, I am also someone who works super fast. As a result, I tend to overestimate how many things I can do, and end up saying YES to things I should have said NO. No longer. This year, for the very first […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 22, 2019
One of the things I have begun to appreciate with time is the value of drafts. I am pretty good at cranking out a first draft of a paper, and then I hate editing and revising it. The editorial process for me is way more painful than the writing process itself. But as I said […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– January 7, 2019
My students often come to me frustrated to my office and tell me “Professor Pacheco-Vega, I am making such slow progress with my dissertation/thesis/paper. I feel like I need to read faster, or read more”. I know this feeling. I often feel like I haven’t done enough. What I always tell them is what I […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 30, 2018
When I was a child, I learned Pittman and Gregg shorthand because my grandfather taught me about them. He learned Gregg shorthand in secretarial/administrative assistant school, and I learned both Pittman and Gregg when I took a class (I was in grade 7 but this was not part of the school’s curriculum, so I had […]
By Raul Pacheco-Vega
– December 10, 2018
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