Upcoming Event
Publish and Flourish: Make a Writing Plan for Spring Semester
The goal for this workshop is for participants to leave with a spring semester writing plan that takes the realities of teaching, professional, departmental and personal commitments into account. We’ll review principles of productive writing based on the work of Robert Boice (Professors as Writers) and Paul Silvia (How to Write a Lot). We’ll discuss practices designed to lower stress, create productive writing sessions, and maintain motivation. For more information about the workshop, visit http://bit.ly/ResourcesforWriting. If you have any questions, contact Robert Danberg, Coordinator of Campus Wide Writing Support rdanberg@binghamton.edu.
The Publish and Flourish Workshops have three goals:
Practice strategies for planning and managing an upcoming semester or summer's work
Practice strategies and principles for setting goals and planning project
Leave the workshops with a plan for the upcoming semester's work, including calendars and lists of goals
These workshops are based on principles and techniques from several sources which you can learn more about through the links on this website and in the bibliography.
The workshops are built around the following principles articulated in the work of Robert Boice, Paul Silvia, and Eviatar Zerubavel. Often, writer's in academic settings feel that the "locus of control" has shifted from the writer to the project. The workshops are intended to give writer's a way to view, organize and work their way through a project.
Constancy and Moderation. Through his work with tenure track faculty, Boice came to believe that the faculty prepared for tenure tended to avoid "binge writing." They did not delay writing until they felt "ready" and had large chunks of time available. They did not leave large spaces of time between writing sessions. The writers called "quick starters" worked in sessions over time, left few days between contact with a project, and used time set aside for writing to address many aspects of a project besides composing drafts. "Binge Writers" tended to experience more anxiety and depression around writing projects than the "Quick Starters".
Reflection and Planfulness. Boice observes that a routine of planning and reflection helps writers to manage work over time and be more productive. Planning can include many tools, including lists and calendars, that suits the writer's project. In principle, these writers saw stepping outside of the project to view it's progress and the process involved so they could make adjustments as part of the writing process, not an addition to it.
Proximal Goals. How we go about planning influences how we execute the project. In these workshops, we use an approach adapted from David Allen's Getting Things Done, Project and Next Actions Lists. We'll use articulate Projects and and explore how to break them down into "Next Actions" that can move a project forward.
The workshop will be organized as follows.
Introduction to the principles of practice.
What do we mean by writing?
Free Writing and Writing Freely: Getting the First Draft Written
Using the Time You Have: Semester, Monthly, and Weekly Planning
Setting Goals: Project and Next Action Lists
Mapping Goals to Time
Weekly Planning and Reflection: Work Logs and Project Notebooks
What can you do within a writing session?