Becoming a research writer

Over the past twenty years, academic writing has become an important component of academic and professional work, although the difficulty of finding time to write is a recurring theme in accounts of academic life. Lack of time for writing is a complex problem. I don’t think it’s lack of skill or ideas or poor time management. I think we need to reflect on and refresh our understanding of writing practices, just as we do with other practices. It’s not just a matter of increasing our knowledge of academic writing and research – important as these are – but of changing writing behaviours. In this session I define strategies for academic writing, give examples of activities to release writers from blocks and barriers to writing, explain how social writing helps and conclude by suggesting that these strategies can help practitioners who want to write but struggle to do so, to find time to get started, keep going and write about what matters to them.