- How to write persuasively in promotion and tenure documents Be sure your application shows the significance of your work while focusing on your most compelling accomplishments (24 July 2020)
- Doing anti-racist academic work How to practice and perform anti-racist research, teaching, and service (11 June 2020)
- Getting your book read when you’re a humanities scholar Part 2: Strategies to extend your monograph’s reach (15 May 2020)
- How to get your humanities research read & cited Part 1: Strategies to extend your journal article’s reach (2 Apr 2020)
- Your grant budget is a mess! How to demonstrate feasibility in your proposal’s budget and justifying some of those out of the norm expenses (12 Mar 2020)
- Simple tricks to add clarity in complex sentences: The criticism that some academic writing can be difficult to read shouldn’t be ignored (14 Feb 2020)
- Jargon can make for good academic writing: The use of jargon can be effective in journal articles and grant applications - but use it sparingly when writing for a wider audience (20 Jan 2020)
- Decolonizing your grant application: To adopt a decolonizing approach, you’ll need to know what Indigenous sovereignty looks like (5 Dec, 2019)
- Reducing the weight of your words: How to lighten your reader’s cognitive load in your academic writing (Nov 8, 2019)
- How to revise and resubmit without despair: A six-step approach for doing the (seemingly) impossible task of applying reviewer feedback to your journal article (Oct 14, 2019)
- Three ways to use colour effectively in grant applications: Ineffective colour can make an otherwise compelling image incomprehensible (Sept 5, 2019)
- The politics of pronouns: The singular “they” and your power to choose as an academic writer (Aug 8, 2019)
- How, when and why to use readability formulas to improve your academic writing: There are many tools that measure readability scores, but few contexts in which they’re useful for academics (July 10, 2019)
- Integrating non-English words into academic writing: The political and persuasive significance of being intentionally hard to understand (June 18, 2019)
- Being understood outside your discipline: How to immerse yourself in the linguistic world in which your readers live, write, and think (May 9, 2019)
- How to publish compelling, collaboratively written journal articles: When authoring together, be innovative in language and structure, but conform to convention as you submit your work to be published (Apr 5, 2019)
- Fresh Eyes for your Academic Writing: How three free algorithms can help you to edit efficiently (Mar 1, 2019)
- Proposing and structuring conference papers: Strategies to surprise and excite your audience (Feb 6, 2019)
- How to craft an organizational structure for your research article: The IMRAD, hourglass, and inverted pyramid structures are all options you can use - it is up to you to find which works best for your article. (Jan 11, 2019)
- How to write a statement of teaching philosophy that shines: Your discipline and its conventions shape how you do research. How might they also shape your approach in the classroom? (Dec 7, 2018)
- Strategic paragraph structuring: Be conscious and deliberate with how you occupy the landscape of your writing (Nov 13, 2018)
- Your reader is a little bit drunk: Many academics are chronically sleep deprived. When you’re writing your most important documents, ensure your formatting makes it easy for tired brains to process your words (Oct 16, 2018)
- Getting “is” right: When you can’t tell how to conjugate “to be,” your lay summary isn’t laying correctly (Sept 19, 2018)
“Ask Dr. Editor” at UniversityAffairs.ca
Academic editing / Advising / Communication / Contributions to the Field / Plain Language Writing / Professional Advocacy / Teaching / Writing / Writing Instructions
I write a monthly advice column at UniversityAffairs.ca called "Ask Dr. Editor." Through this column, I respond to the writing questions of academics in Canada, relating the finer details of their queries to broader issues of academic communication and knowledge dissemination.