Rather than going into your weekly readings looking to be surprised, you may have an easier time if you identify what you need to get out of those readings first. Remember, your job in graduate school isn’t just to retain content. You want to be able to understand your various readings in relation to each…Continue Reading Reading Checklist Worksheet
Tag: resources
Academic Journals 2/x: Choosing the Right Journal
As a graduate student, you might feel pressure to publish your work in an academic journal ASAP. Sometimes this pressure will turn into a compulsion to aim for the top journal in your field–you may have heard particularly cantankerous faculty members in your department (they are in every department) claim that publishing in “low quality”…Continue Reading Academic Journals 2/x: Choosing the Right Journal
Academic Journals 1/x: How Things Work
The process of submitting to and hopefully being published in an academic journal can be opaque. Every journal has it’s own rules; different editors communicate (or don’t) differently; and the advice that you receive from different academic advisors might be vague or conflicting. If you’ve been given some hard and fast rules for how-to and…Continue Reading Academic Journals 1/x: How Things Work
Editing Techniques for Graduate Writing: AXES Highlighting
If the hardest thing about writing is starting, then editing is probably a close second. YOU wrote the thing — if you could have written it differently, you would have, right? Editing is especially challenging if you approach it in the same way that you approach writing a first draft. The way that a good…Continue Reading Editing Techniques for Graduate Writing: AXES Highlighting
APA Style (and other styles that are not APA style) — FAQ
One or more of your professors may have mentioned (presumably in either hushed or frantic tones) that they want the papers you write for their class to adhere to “APA style” or “APA formatting.” If you had never heard of such a thing, this request may have seemed at once both urgent and deceptively understated,…Continue Reading APA Style (and other styles that are not APA style) — FAQ
Using Grammarly Effectively
If you’ve worked with someone on your writing–either me, another writing coach, or a consultant at the USC Dornsife Writing Center–you might have noticed that we tend to focus on “big picture” concerns (sometimes called higher-order issues) like argument, structure, and organization over discrete grammatical issues. I think this is important because, unless a grammatical…Continue Reading Using Grammarly Effectively