Academic writing and dissertation coaching services
Academic writing is difficult and specialized, and junior faculty, in particular, are often in need of writing support: they have been cut loose from graduate school support networks (such as dissertation writing groups and advisers), but have not yet established new networks—all at a time when they are busier than ever with new responsibilities, and when writing productivity is absolutely crucial to their career success.
My coaching packages are designed to support successful, productive academic writing for dissertation writers or junior faculty, working with you on actual current projects, rather than setting artificial skill-building assignments that take up your precious writing time:
Accountability/scaffolding: breaking down large writing projects into discrete, manageable chunks; setting writing goals and target dates for these chunks and following up to be sure goals are met
Sounding board for ideas: talking through ideas and helping outline/develop the project’s organization, flow, and logic so that you don’t end up going down dead ends and wasting too much drafting time
Feedback on the technical side of writing: customized discussion of the problems and strengths that characterize your specific writing style, and help/advice/coaching on how to strengthen the weak points and capitalize on the strong points in your writing patterns.
Emotional support: helping authors work through the inevitable feelings that writing brings up.
Coaching will help you develop, organize, draft, revise, and polish whatever projects are most important (and most deadline-driven)—you’ll turn your chapters, revise-and-resubmits, and book manuscripts in on time, and you’ll be confident that they are in their best possible state!
Structure
Coaching packages cover four weeks at a time. Each week, you can choose one of two weekly formats, or we can design a custom coaching package that meets your specific needs:
Two rounds of reading/commenting on the weekly chunk of writing (a first read in which I comment on initial problems, a ~15-minute Skype meeting with a mini-lesson on the most pressing issues, revision by you, then a second read for fine-tuning) or
One round of reading and a ~1.5 hour Skype consultation to talk through that week’s chunk (outlining, drafting, working through sentence-level issues).
Each monthly coaching package includes email support (during business hours) for the entire month.