AcWriMo 2022: Academic Writing Month

Contents

1. What is it?
2. Who is it for?
3. What can you do?
4. Writing improvement goals
5. Workshops
6. Daily check-in

What is it?

Academic Writing Month (or #AcWriMo) was inspired by the long-running #NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month during which people try to write a novel and share their progress in public. While not everybody finishes their novel, everyone has a chance to improve.

Academic Writing Month is less about finishing a piece of writing and more about building good habits and working towards improvement. To support this effort, we have collated some resources to help you improve your writing productivity.

The aim is to explore different strategies and tools to get more writing done with less effort and support others in doing the same.

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Who is it for?

AcWriMo was started by academics to help them write for publication. But in fact, anybody involved in writing in the academic context can benefit.

1. Academics writing for publication
2. Academics supporting students
3. Students writing short and long work
4. Academic administrators who want to support academics or improve their own writing.

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What can you do?

Here are some suggestions of what you can use this month for:

1. Set a writing improvement goal
2. Join one of two workshops on writing productivity run by Dominik Lukeš
3. Join a daily writing check-in.

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Writing improvement goals

Almost everybody feels like they can improve their writing. From accomplished published authors to undergraduates struggling with their first essays. Everybody is starting at a different place, but everybody can use the same principles to help them improve.

1. Reflect
2. Practice
3. Reflect.

Any change takes time and consistency. It is important to learn what the issue is through reflection, then identify goals for improvement, then practice to get better at it. At the end we need to reflect again to see what else we can improve and practice again.

Some suggested goals

Here are some goals you can think about for November (or any other time):

1. Better writing habits – try to make your writing more consistent by experimenting with different times and spaces to write.
2. Increase writing fluency – try to make your writing less of a chore and improve your ‘writing flow’.
3. More readable academic language – you may want to make your writing more academic or less. English may not be your first language, or you are writing for a non-academic audience.
4. More effective use of assistive technology – try to make better use of the tools you have, or incorporate new tools (be it a spelling checker, reference manager, or a mind mapping or note taking tool).
5. Develop more positive feelings about writing – for many people writing is a stressful task. You can use this time to reflect on blockers that make you feel bad about writing and see if there’s anything you can do to minimise them.

Sources of inspiration

If you would like to get some inspiration from others, you can:

1. Follow the #AcWriMo hashtag on Twitter
2. Read about the goals of AcWriMo from the founders
3. Read one or more of four books on writing.

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Workshops

If you would like more inspiration about what to do with academic writing, you can join these online workshops.

Building your writing productivity toolkit: Software, hardware and other tools to help you get more writing done

Tue 8 Nov, 5-6.30pm

Register (open to the public)

This free online workshop will explore latest developments in technology that can be used to improve writing productivity and the skills required to make the most out of it.

• New developments in note-taking and note-management tools
• Building better workflows for reference management
• Using advances in synthetic speech to improve editing
• Using speech recognition to overcome physical barriers
• Text generation and text completion – what it can and cannot do
• Tools strategies for managing long and complex documents
• Is a distraction-free editor right for you?

Building your writing muscle: Using deliberate practice as a strategy for improvement

Tue 15 Nov, 5-6.30pm

Register (open to the public)

This free online workshop will use the metaphor of the Couch to 5K running programme for thinking about writing improvement. It will present the key principles and discuss how we can use them to develop an Academic Writing Boot up programme.

Together we will explore ways in which you can use deliberate practice to improve any aspect of your writing. It will address these topics:

• Writing as a complex skill that can be improved
• Importance of fluency to success in writing
• Role of working memory and mental representations in fluent writing
• Using targeted reflection to identify blockers to writing using the BASE model
• Using deliberate repetition to improve any aspect of writing skill.

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Daily check-in

Part of the purpose of the month is to set goals and build good habits to achieve them.

To help you, we’ve set up a daily online check-in for the month of November from 8.30-9am with Dominik Lukeš, the Centre for Teaching and Learning's Assistive Technology Officer.

You can join daily or just once or twice to meet with others interested in the same thing. You decide how you want to use the half hour. Some suggestions are:

1. Sit together quietly and get some writing done
2. Discuss writing goals
3. Check in on progress
4. Discuss writing strategies
5. Discuss / try new tools for writing
6. Ask and answer questions about writing.

If you would like to join these daily check-ins fill in this daily check-in sign up form and we will send you a calendar invite.

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