How Successful Academics Write

‘Publish or perish’ is the mantra of the successful academic. Yet few academics have been explicitly trained as writers, and fewer still have been schooled in the intricate art of maintaining research productivity without sacrificing work-life balance.  Professor Helen Sword has surveyed more than 1,300 academics from across the disciplines and around the world to find out about their professional formation as writers, their daily work habits and their habits of mind.  In this workshop, you will learn about the BASE habits of successful academic writers – behavioural, artisanal, social and emotional – and develop your own customised blueprint for building a more productive writing practice from the ground up.

Invited Presenter - Helen Sword is a scholar, poet, and award-winning teacher whose books include Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard 2012), The Writer's Diet (Chicago 2016) and Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard 2017). She is Professor and Director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland and the recipient of a 2007 Teaching Excellence Award for Innovation in Teaching, the 2013 HERDSA-TERNZ medal for research with a major impact on tertiary education research in New Zealand and a 2017 University of Auckland Research Excellence Award.  Her popular academic writing workshops have taken her to more than 60 universities in North America, Europe, Asia, Australasia and Africa. See her website (www.helensword.com) for links to her books, her digital poetry, and the Writer’s Diet test, a free diagnostic tool for writers.