Silvia 1976 American Psychological Association

Silvia PJ (1976) How to write a lot. A practical guide to productive academic writing. American Psychological Association Washington DC:149 pp.

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Silvia PJ (1976) American Psychological Association

Abstract: All students and professors need to write, and many struggle to finish their stalled dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, or grant proposals. Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule.

In this practical, light-hearted, and encouraging book, Paul Silvia explains that writing productively does not require innate skills or special traits but specific tactics and actions. Drawing examples from his own field of psychology, he shows readers how to overcome motivational roadblocks and become prolific without sacrificing evenings, weekends, and vacations. After describing strategies for writing productively, the author gives detailed advice from the trenches on how to write, submit, revise, and resubmit articles, how to improve writing quality, and how to write and publish academic work.

• Bioblast editor: Gnaiger E

Quotations

• p 4: WRITING IS HARD

• p 12: If you think that writing time is lurking somewhere, hidden deep within your weekly schedule, you will never write a lot. If you think that you won’t be able to write until a big block of time arrives, such as spring break or the summer months, then you’ll never write a lot. Finding time is a destructive way of thinking about writing. Never say this again. - Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write.

• p 13: To begin, allot a mere 4 hours per week. After you see the astronomical increase in your writing output, you can always add more hours.

• p 14: Most people use a wasteful, unproductive strategy called binge writing (Kellogg, 1994).

• p 20: Unproductive writers often bemoan the lack of "their own space" to write.

• p 30: Goal setting is part of the process of writing.

• p 39: Monitoring your writing progress has many good motivational effects.

• p 45: What about writer's block? - Don't confuse yourself with your friends teaching crative writing in the fine arts department. .. Writer's block is nothing more than the behavior of not writing. Saying that you can't write because of writer's block is merely saying that you can't write because you aren't writing.

• p 47: Setting priorities among your project goals will take the stress out of managing several projects at once.

• p 51: Agraphia - the pathologic loss of the ability to write.

• p 59: Our academic journals radiate bad writing .. But if you talk with the authors of these disastrously written articles, you’ll find that they’re enthusiastic about their work.

• p 60: .. don't hide your ideas behind a wall of junk English .. It won't be long before your sentences sound more like you and less like an anonymous, desiccated academic.

• p 61: Avoid trendy phrases that sound intellectual.

• p 61: When defined with normal words, technical terms are easy to understand.

• p 62: .. don’t mindlessly write the words you see in professional journals.

• p 62: .. writing about the existing literature. Is there a nonexistent literature that I should be reading and referencing?

• p 63: Speaking of people, I stopped writing participants when describing my research participants. .. I study adult humans, so person and people are good words for my Methods sections.

• p 64: Readers find rereading abbreviations more tedious than rereading real words.

• p 64: Delete 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 acutally smother your sentences completely.

• p 70: .. the such that virus afflicts writers who fear simple sentences.

• p 71: All books about writing urge people to write in the active voice. - Passive writing, by hiding the sentence's doer, strikes people as vague and evasive. Writers who want to sound smart drift toward the passive voice; they like its impersonal sound and its stereotypical association with scholarly writing.

• p 72: "ivving it up" .. indicative of .. reflectiive of .. supportive of .. Delete all to be ____ive of phrases by rewriting the verb.

• p 76: ‘Few people realize how badly they write.’ .. clear writing requires clear thinking.

• p 79: Writers who complain about writer's block are writers who don't outline.

• p 86: Good results sections create a story.

• p 87: There is no law against presenting data in both a figure and a table: The figure is for readers who want to see the pattern of data, and the table is for readers who want the dirty details.

• p 99: Writers motivated by failure avoidance write papers that sound defensive, wishy-washy, and uncertain. Instead of trying to look good, they try not to look bad.

• p 100: Rejections are like a sales tax on publications. The more papers you publish, the more rejections you receive.

• p 101: Scientific progress is faster when people connect their work to others' work, identify problems in their own research, analyze data properly, and avoid misleading descriptions of what they or others have accomplished.

• p 101: You will be asked to change your paper; sometimes those changes will be extensive. If this bothers you, then you'll hate to hear that published articles are always better than the first drafts.

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