How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (APA LifeTools Series)

by Paul J. Silvia

readers find rereading abbreviations more tedious than rereading real words.

Avoid most uses of very, quite, basically, actually, virtually, extremely, remarkably, completely, at all, and so forth. Basically, these quite useless words add virtually nothing at all; like weeds, they’ll in fact actually smother your sentences completely. In Junk English, Smith (2001) called these words parasitic intensifiers:

parasitic intensifiers are basically begging to be totally omitted.

A researcher on my campus posted flyers for an “infant-parent interaction study.” Forget teen pregnancy—let’s stop infant pregnancy.

Don’t stew in shame and self-recrimination when you write passive sentences. Scholarly writing addresses impersonal agents—concepts, theories, constructs, relationships.

Generating text and revising text are distinct parts of writing—don’t do both at once. The goal of text generation is to throw confused, wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the words clean so that they sound nice and can go out in public.

Perfectionism is paralyzing.

It’s okay if your first drafts sound like they were hastily translated from Icelandic.

Choosing your target journal is thus the first step in writing. If you know who you’re writing for, you can craft the paper to appeal to them. Most of your vexing writing decisions can be solved by using that journal’s published articles as models.

Outlining is writing, not a prelude to “real writing.”

For most articles, the time-honored books-and-bookends formula (Silvia, 2015, p. 97) will make your Introduction sleek and compelling. This formula divides the Introduction into brief opening and closing sections that flank longer chunks of ideas, much like small bookends holding books upright.

cleaving

Just as all museums have heaps of paintings in the basement vault that they could have displayed, you probably have heaps of peripheral findings that you find fascinating but would clutter the walls.

If you discuss more than three, you’ll start to sound like a self-indulgent jam band.

If you’re sending your paper to a family studies journal, for example, but rarely cite articles from those journals, you’ll look like an interloper who wants an audience without taking the trouble to connect to it.

In this case, the perfectionists are probably right. Editors are more likely to invite a revision when the first draft is tight because the author seems like someone who would resubmit a revision without much drama.

Experience shows that the editor’s action letter will arrive at the most inconvenient time, usually when a grant proposal is due in 2 weeks or you’re 85% done with another manuscript.

Don’t antagonize the editor by resubmitting a revised draft as a new manuscript or sending a whiny letter of protest, which is the researcher version of entitled grade-grubbing. It’s more dignified to take some lumps, rework the paper, and send it somewhere else.

After you identify the action points, revise the manuscript quickly. Your paper is close to publication, so don’t slow down now

If you don’t make a suggested change, your revision letter will need to spend some time explaining your reasons.

When you resubmit your manuscript, you’ll need to send a cover letter that describes how you handled the criticisms and comments. Here is where the publishing game is won or lost.

If you send them a reasonable, comprehensive, and low-drama cover letter, they can get a quick win by accepting your manuscript and moving on to the next one in their pile.

and lengthy reviews of the literature that your thesis committee wanted to see but your readers already know.

Hacking down the brush and brambles of peripheral ideas can feel wrenching, but your readers will see farther when they’re gone.

Editors get more good papers than they have space for, so they’ll reject your paper if it needs overhauling.

Your paper might be rejected once or twice before it finds a home, but a good paper will always find a good home.

For scholars in “book fields” like history, classics, religious studies, and literary criticism, books are the coin of their intellectual realms. Getting hired, tenured, and promoted requires coming up with appealing ideas, developing those ideas into big manuscripts, and persuading one of a shrinking number of scholarly publishers to publish it as a book.

Writing books hurts like no other kind of writing. Unlike the acute pain of grant writing, which goes away once the deadline passes, the chronic aches and fevers of book writing will afflict you for years.

If you want to learn a new area of scholarship, committing to write something about it forces you to read widely, critically, and thoughtfully. And after doing all that reading, you will surely have something worth writing about.

Because we were inadvertently writing one. Just as people can give birth without knowing they were pregnant, scholars can write a big book without knowing it.

For scholarly books, I particularly recommend Getting It Published (Germano, 2016) and Developmental Editing (Norton, 2009).

And once you have a set of chapters, each of roughly equal length, and outlines for each chapter, you’ll have a table of contents—the book writer’s version of seeing the baby on the ultrasound monitor.

You don’t need a sabbatical. If you wait two years for a sabbatical and then write your manuscript in 6 months, did you write your book in 6 months or 30 months? Waiting for a sabbatical to work on a book is the same old “Big Blocks of Time” specious barrier (see Chapter 2

Avoid pausing the book for more than a month, lest it go into hibernation for a whole season.

Faculty grouse about students turning in work late, but professorial tardiness is legion in publishing. Academic authors so rarely deliver their manuscripts on time—one imagines that unrealistic optimism, binge writing, and waiting for sabbaticals have something to do with it—that your publisher will be surprised and impressed.

It’s worth asking (or hiring) a keen-eyed friend to scour the proofs, just in case the typo imps changed assess to asses again.

If you’re inclined to write a textbook because of daydreams of untold wealth, you would probably make more money regularly selling your plasma.

But whatever you choose to write, you now know how to write a book: weekly, according to a writing schedule.

Plan to wrap up your proposal at least 2 weeks before it is due—the earlier, the better. This gives your institution time to route and process everything. (So few people do this that the grants staff will notice and appreciate your diligence. Someday you might be a bit late or need an urgent favor, and they will remember.)

Don’t be that third group that chases money.

I genuinely believe, in a tacit way that’s hard to articulate, that my writing and teaching are the same intellectual beast—much like a two-headed box turtle hatched in a fetid academic pond.

I’ve been around long enough to know that it will not be different unless we choose to make it so. If we don’t shoehorn our writing into the normal work week, no one will do it for us.

Prolific writers might have more publications, but they don’t always have more good ideas than anyone else.

“When I think of the good things still to be written I am glad,” wrote William Saroyan (1952), “for there is no end to them, and I know I myself shall write some of them” (p. 2).