Self-Care and Community Care in Academia
We’re written quite a bit about self-care over the last year. It underlies many of our discussions of writing, motivation, craft, and editing. But good advice that doesn’t define its […]
cultural scripts
The Plain Language Ideal
This week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released their plain-language standard for written communication. This marks the first internationally accepted statement of what clear communication means. The movement towards […]
The Zen of Writing (Part 5): When Motivation Disappears
This week we’re reflecting, as we often do, on the fickleness of motivation. While it’s often possible to adjust to natural fluctuations of energy, sometimes motivation disappears as a package—we […]
On Being a Writer and Draft -2
Clients sometimes tell us that they are “not writers”. What they usually mean is that they’re not looking for suggestion on how to take their writing to the next level—they […]
Attention, Writing, and Editing
Following from last week’s post on deep work, we’ve been thinking a bit more about attention. Skill in writing is, among other things, skill with subtleties of attention. So let’s […]
Artificial Intelligence, Writing, and Editing (Part 5): Reckoning and Judgment
The public discussion that started with ChatGPT continues. It now concerns language models (LLMs) in general, most recently with the (troubled) launches of Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney. There’s deep […]
From Inspiration to Perspiration: Draft 2 and Beyond
Elsewhere, we have written about the qualities of draft -1, draft 0, and draft 1. We offer these because starting to write can feel very different day-to-day, and sometimes minute-by-minute. […]
Self-Care (Part 3): Kindness for Writers
In the reflection that started this year we talked about the importance of kindness in achieving your goals. Being kinder to ourselves is wonderful aspiration, but often the specifics of […]
The Zen of Writing (Part 4): Failure
Today we return to a series we’ve been developing on the Zen of writing. We started by examining the aspiration to achieve flow while writing, then looked at how we […]
The Existential Pleasures of Getting Edited and Coached
A reflection on how editing and coaching helps support a growth mindset to make writing easier and more fulfilling.