Scholarly Communication

Today’s book is: Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012), by Helen Sword, which dispels the myth that you only get published by writing wordy, impersonal prose. Dr. Sword reveals that journal editors and readers alike welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Her analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a range of fields documents the startling gap between how academics describe good writing, and the prose they actually produce. Too few scholars were taught how to create accessible prose, a problem Stylish Academic Writing addresses by showcasing works from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences written with both vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure. Stylish Academic Writing also offers examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.Our guest is: Dr. Helen Sword who is an international expert on academic, professional, and creative writing across the disciplines. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University, and is a former Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland. She now specializes in facilitating retreats, workshops, and masterclasses. She is the author of The Writer’s Diet; Air and Light, Space and Time: How Successful Academics Write; Writing With Pleasure; and Stylish Academic Writing.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also like this playlist: Becoming the Writer You Already Are Top 10 struggles in writing a book manuscript and what to do about it Exploring the emotional arc of turning a dissertation into a book Tackling your writing roadblocks An editor shares about writing for the general public Demystifying the path to publication DIY writing retreats Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Claire Le Goues, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about writing to present versus writing to express.Claire Le Goues : "Really, the very best natural writers that I've ever had in my group were not native English speakers. Because writing a good paper is very much not about idiomatic or expressive language. I mean, sure, there is a point at which grammar becomes prohibitive to understanding. I mean, it needs to be correct enough that we can understand it without ambiguity. But good writing — it's about the argument, it’s about the order the information’s being presented in, it’s about hitting the appropriate level of abstraction or granularity. And that really has, fundamentally, very little to do with the language it's written in."Links: squaresLab Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Diomidis Spinellis, Professor of Software Engineering, Athens University of Economics and Business, and as well Professor of Software Analytics, Delft University of Technology. We talk a lot about audience — especially how to reach them.Diomidis Spinellis: "They say that traveling enriches the mind. I think that the same applies to working outside your own narrow discipline. You get to know different ways of conceptualizing problems, of attacking them — you witness the value in other methods or entire other structures for building up knowledge — and also, you may learn to appreciate things you've come to look down upon because those things don't follow the conventions of your home discipline. All of this is enriching, and all of it improves the research."Links: Advice for Writing LaTeX Documents Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Using techniques garnered from startups and quickly evolving technology companies, in The Experimental Library: A Guide to Taking Risks, Failing Forward, and Creating Change (ALA Editions, 2023), Cathryn Copper explores how information professionals can use experimentation to make evidence-based decisions and advance innovative initiatives.The last five years have demonstrated that sticking with the status quo is not an option; instead, as the experiences of many libraries have shown, those that experiment are better positioned to adapt to rapidly changing environments and evolving user needs and behaviors. The Experimental Library supports librarians as they draw from new approaches and technologies to harness experimentation as a tool for testing ideas and responding to change. Copper borrows ideas and inspiration from the startup sector to teach you how to take a human-centered and design thinking-based perspective on problem solving. This conversation for New Books Network explores the mindset, methodology, and culture that support experimentation in libraries.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Emma Frances Bloomfield, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We talk about her novel analytical tool for helping you narrativize research! Bloomfield's new book is Science V. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators (U California Press, 2024)Emma Bloomfield : "I'd love to see more direct incorporation of communication studies and communication skills into the science curriculum but also into a researcher's overall training as well. Because I think that researchers can be very good at communication, but unfortunately they're not specifically trained in it and they're not really incentivized to do it. Basically, we put researchers, unnecessarily, before the choice of becoming either public intellectuals or recognized members of their research community and tenured professors at university. But we can give people more time and more compensation so that they can do both — and that will benefit the research and the communication of the research." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a specific inspiration: an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, a technological innovation—and from that starting point explores the object of the title, gleaning a singular lesson or multiple lessons along the way.This interview discusses the series with one of the two editors of the series, Dr. Christopher Schaberg. Featuring contributions from writers, artists, scholars, journalists, and others, the emphasis throughout is lucid writing, imagination, and brevity. Object Lessons paints a picture of the world around us, and tells the story of how we got here, one object at a time. Many Object Lessons books have been interviewed on the New Books Network to date, including: Trench Coat, Mushroom, Ok, Grave, Wine, Magazine, Stroller, Barcode, Recipe, Hyphen, Pregnancy Test, Gitter, Relic, Pencil, Air Conditioning, and Swimming Pool.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Miroslaw Staron, Editor-in-Chief of Information and Software Technology and Professor in the Software engineering division, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg. We talk about the collaboration and mentorship which publishing is meant to be.Miroslaw Staron : "The communication through academic publication is of course important to every researcher's CV. But really, it's much more important for science overall. If we cannot communicate our ideas, then we cannot make those ideas available to the scrutiny of others. That is, if we are unable to show what we have actually worked on and which kind of methodology we have used to do that work, and if we can't really describe the kind of results we have achieved — then really, I mean, just ask yourself, how should someone else ever be able to get back to us to say, 'Yes, this is a good idea,' or, ‘No, this is a bad idea, but I know how to do it right'? Because that is the way to move the field forward — it all rests on the communication."Links Miroslaw's advice on writing Information and Software Technology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Brandon Brown, Professor of Physics at the University of San Francisco. We talk about factoring in both message-sender and -receiver to your writing for STEM. Brown is the author of Sharing Our Science: How to Write and Speak STEM (MIT Press, 2023).Brandon Brown : "I've seen so many different scientists and communicators, including Nobel Laureates, all the way to grad students who are struggling with the English — and it's just apparent to me that some people do have a much better sense of audience. And to my mind, that level of compassion, even perhaps of connection — that is what makes their communication work so very well. And really, this is a talent or disposition which is independent of a person's linguistic skills or background, isn't it?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to Episode No.9 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois; and joining us, as well, is James Gee, Regents Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the generativity of machines.James Gee : "I fundamentally believe that humans are a screwed-up species — one of the few species that will put themselves out of business in a shorter evolutionary time than any species that has lived on Earth. So, something must be wrong with us. And I think what's wrong with us is, we don't understand what sort of animal we are. That's why our schools are no good — we don't understand how humans really learn. We don't understand what a human really is. We have an elevated view of our own rationality, of our own intelligence, and the consequence is, we are depleting the world. So, the biggest attempt we can still make now is to use everything we can (including Chat) to retheorize who we are as a being before we put ourselves out of existence." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Emad Shihab, Full Professor and Concordia Research Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, Canada. We talk about authenticating learning and unlocking potential in people — the true ways to innovate research.Emad Shihab : "To build a vision, I always say, try to make it ambitious and then break it down. So, just saying, 'I want to change the world,' I mean, it's a great vision but the truth is, nobody knows what their part in that is supposed to be — how can they contribute to you changing the world. That’s why, for me, having a vision is — you try to build whatever it is that the vision is meant to do, then you make sure you break it down into smaller pieces so that people can know the parts that they could play in that vision.”Learn about Create SE4AI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices