In the last few years I’ve added working with academic staff to the work I do as a writing coach with small business owners. For some this seems like quite a leap, but really, I’m just returning to my roots.

While all of my books and most of my blog posts are written for writers who are in business, my training goes back to my PhD in English Literature at the University of California at Davis. There I trained to teach writing to undergraduates and participated in a fellowship (Professors for the Future) in which I supported postgraduate and postdoctoral students in their writing.

Do academic staff need help with writing?

The first time a university hired me to help academic staff, I excitedly told my mum about it, and she asked, ‘Why do they need your help?’ That’s a fair question from someone who’s not an academic. Worryingly, though I also hear it from academics and those who support them.

The biggest problem academic writers have, after the time issue (academics have far too many demands on their time), is the simple fact that they’re academics.

Why is that a problem? Because what makes a successful academic is also what makes an anxious or unhappy writer.

Most academics did well at school and at university. Both achievements require learning how to write the hardest way possible: for exams. They know writing feels hard for them and assume that means they’re not very good at it. Some may even have been told they couldn’t write; I know I was told that on a few memorable occasions.

Because most of the writing instruction students receive is around exam writing, many end up feeling that’s the only or the best way to write, even decades after they graduate. This leads to academics who:

• Resist writing
• Lack confidence in their writing

I can help with both problems.

Academics who resist writing

Resistance to writing can take different forms. Some resist until they panic, and then they write quickly and send things out before they’re ready. While others simply never find time to write in the first place.

You know someone is resisting writing when they say things like:

• I need to think about it more; I’ll write it up once it’s all clear in my head.
• I need to do more research – even though they’ve been researching for months (or years).
• I’ve started the paper, but I’m not happy with the opening paragraph/section (or sentence); I need to get that right before I move on.
• I’ll write after I finish marking this batch of essays (or whatever other important, time-consuming task they have on their plate). But after they finish the task, they focus on another one, not their writing.

Writers who say the first three things are most likely to eventually write in haste after panic sets in. The fourth, however, is unlikely to start writing at all because there will always be another important task that needs to be cleared first.

All four writers need help to:

• Reframe how they see writing time
• Develop a writing process that fosters progress
• Learn to see themselves as confident researchers who belong in a research community

Below, I’ll outline how I address these issues when I work with academic staff; this work can be done in both group and in 1:1 sessions.

Writing time

We all know academics have a lot of demands on their time. When we’re stuck in a state of feeling like we can never get through our to-do list, self-doubt creeps in. We tend to assume that ‘everyone else’ can keep up easily, and the fact that we can’t signals there’s something wrong with us.

This problem is exacerbated by our beliefs about how good writers write, and when we don’t write that way, we feel like bad writers. Culturally, we are encouraged to believe that writing happens in particular circumstances that only the privileged few have access to:

• In the right place – see Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)
• With the right inspiration – see poets from the ancients appealing to the Muses to Milton and Wordsworth …
• In the right conditions – no interruptions; no distractions from email, students, other meetings; no noise or the right kind of noise or music; no feelings of tiredness or discomfort; etc.

When we believe these things have to be in place before we can write, we tend not to write at all. Also, when we fail to find these conditions, we tend to blame ourselves or assume it’s because we’re not good writers.

Researchers and writing coaches often approach this problem with fairly prescriptive, one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’. Many of these ‘solutions’ are inspired by Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers (1990).[1]

Boice conducted a controlled study in which following a writing workshop, academic researchers were split into three groups: 1) told to keep doing what they had always done, 2) told to write for thirty minutes a day and keep a log of their writing time; 3) told to do as group 2 with the addition that Boice would randomly check in on them and their progress each week. At the end, group 3 was the most productive, then group 2, then group 1.

Writing advice books and writing coaches took from this that daily writing is the magic pill for research productivity – the problem with this is that it’s very hard for most people to maintain and it doesn’t suit all writers. When writers are led to believe that truly productive researchers write every day (or even every weekday) without fail, in fact fail to do so, they too often give up. I’ve seen this in my own practice and come across discussions of it in literature on the topic, such as in Helen Sword’s Air and Light and Time and Space (2017).

To address this, instead of dictating that participants must commit to writing for 30 or even 15 minutes every day, I encourage writers to visit their project for 10 minutes several times a week. Sometimes a 10-minute visit will involve writing that moves it forward (and when time allows it will grow into 30 minutes or an hour); other times it will mean writing for 10 minutes about why they can’t write. Both kinds of writing are useful, and both will increase their confidence.

Committing to spending 10 minutes either working on the project, or writing about why we can’t, is an easier commitment to keep than ‘I will write for 30 minutes every day’.

I encourage academic writers to stack this 10-minute habit with an already established habit like writing for 10 minutes before checking email in the morning. Starting the day with writing helps build confidence – you’ll feel accomplished for starting with a small piece of something important. It also encourages writing in small pockets of time throughout the day.

It does this both by proving that you can make meaningful progress in just a few minutes and by getting your brain working on the issue you’re writing about. It will carry on in the background after the 10-minute check in, and the next time you sit down to write, it will likely be easier to find the words.

Since introducing the option to write about why I can’t write to my own writing and with my clients, I’ve seen a drop in writer’s block and other confidence issues. Now, when we get blocked, it doesn’t last long. Also, writing about why we can’t write is writing; that means guilt doesn’t attach to the writing project – guilt is the enemy of writing.

Writing Process

When we take things one step at a time, there’s nothing very difficult about the writing process. Trouble starts when we try to write and edit at the same time. Unfortunately, this is what we have to do in exams, so it’s what we’re taught to do from a young age and academics learn this lesson too well for their own good.

I teach my clients this simple process and encourage them to complete one step before moving on to the next:

• Formulate your arugment
• outline your 

Writing this way and, crucially, accepting that the first draft’s only job is to be done saves time because it helps prevent writer’s block, frustration, and crises of confidence.

Confident Researchers

Writing is often a solitary activity, but it needn’t be. I encourage my clients to form writing groups to help them feel part of a community of researchers and writers.

Writing together helps with motivation and confidence. It helps with motivation because when we write with others, we’re more likely to stay focused on the task at hand. It helps with confidence by helping us to see that others face the same problems we do.

I recommend that writing groups devote the first half hour of each meeting to discussing how their writing is going and any problems they’re having.

This discussion helps the participants see their works in progress as worthwhile and worth discussing with others, which builds confidence. While discussing their challenges both helps them find solutions and shows them that all the participants have similar challenges.

After the discussion, they write for an agreed upon period (90-minutes tends to work well). For the co-writing session to be most helpful, I suggest that they nominate a leader to ask each participant to briefly state what they’ll be working on at the beginning of the co-writing time and then bring them back together 5 minutes before they finish to report on how they got on with their writing.

Having regular meetings with fellow writers will help participants feel part of a research culture.[2] Identifying as a writer in the company of others will help participants feel they have agency over this part of their work while building confidence and making obstacles (such as time constraints) more manageable. 

I’ve seen these kinds of groups work well for researchers at every stage of their career, and the benefits I noticed amongst doctoral and post-doctoral students the first time I ran such groups during my PhD are similar to those I’ve seen amongst senior lecturers and readers more recently.

During my PhD, I won a Professors for the Future (PFTF) fellowship for my plan to help doctoral and post-doctoral students form writing groups and use them effectively. In putting that plan into action, I found that, as projected in the fellowship application, meeting regularly with peers had several benefits for participants; the main ones were:

• Reduced isolation
• Increased confidence
• Increased productivity

You will have noticed that I have not proposed reading other members’ work. In the PFTF groups I found that participants were overwhelmed with having to read and discuss 3 other scholars’ work each month. I will encourage scholars who want to have that kind of exchange to meet in pairs. Only reading one other scholar’s work will keep the group from feeling like another big thing on their already too long to-do list.

The body-doubling aspect of the co-writing time increases focus and productivity for most writers. There has been a lot of work on the benefits of body doubling for neurodivergent people,[3] but anyone who has attended a writing retreat or worked somewhere like one of the British Library’s reading rooms, knows that working alongside others engaged in the same kind of activity increases focus and productivity. 

How can I help?

For more information on how I can help you and the academic writers in your department, click the button below. It takes you to the page where I detail what kinds of support I can provide. And on that page, you’ll find a button to book a call with me to discuss what support you need.

If it helps you think about who on your team I might be able to support, I’ve worked with academics who:

• have never been research active but want to be.
• once were active, productive researchers, but who have stopped writing and seeing themselves as researchers in recent years.
• publish regularly, but not at the standard the department would like to see (2-star REF submissions that could be 3-star with more work, for example).

Footnotes

[1] Other works that promote daily or almost daily writing as a solution include Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day (1998), Stephen King’s On Writing (2000), Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot (2007), Patricia Goodson’s Becoming an Academic Writer (2013), and Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What (2017).

[2] See also: Geller, Eodice, and Boice’s Working with Faculty Writers (2015), Cassese and Holman (2018), and Martinez et al.’s ‘We are stronger together: reflective testimonios of female scholars of color in a research and writing collective’ (Reflective Practice, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2015. pp. 85–95, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2014.969698).

[3] For example: Ogrodnik, M., Karsan, S., Malamis, B. et al. ’Exploring Barriers and Facilitators to Physical Activity in Adults with ADHD: A Qualitative Investigation’. J Dev Phys Disabil (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-023-09908-6 or Hamdani, M., Hamdani, N., Das, M. ‘How to Help Employees with ADHD Address the Challenges of Remote Work’. MIT Sloan Management Review (2023), Vol. 64, Issue 4, pp. 1–6.