Write or Die http://writeordie.com A way to help “force” yourself to write, if you’re having problems. You can modify rewards and consequences, etc. There seem to be two versions now, here and here. The newer website says that it will be fully functional again by late November, which is perfect timing for our course.
Bolker, Joan. 1998. How to Write your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. New York: Owl Books.
Judith Butler. 1999. “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back.” New York Times: “No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world. Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense.”
Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray. 2010. “Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: Complexity, elaboration, explicitness.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes: The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on results from large-scale corpus investigations. Our findings strongly support the view that academic writing and conversation have dramatically different linguistic characteristics. However, the specific differences are quite surprising. First, we show that academic writing is not structurally ‘elaborated’ (in the traditional sense of this term). In fact, subordinate clauses e especially finite dependent clauses e are much more common in conversation than academic writing. Instead, academic writing is structurally ‘compressed’, with phrasal (nonclausal) modifiers embedded in noun phrases. Additionally, we challenge the stereotype that academic writing is explicit in meaning. Rather, we argue that the ‘compressed’ discourse style of academic writing is much less explicit in meaning than alternative styles employing elaborated structures. These styles are efficient for expert readers, who can quickly extract large amounts of information from relatively short, condensed texts. However, they pose difficulties for novice readers, who must learn to infer unspecified meaning relations among grammatical constituents.
Here is a short documentary film called Black Sci-Fi that includes interviews with Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney. Although most of might not be sci-fi, or even fiction, writers, it’s helpful to hear what motivated these authors to write. My suspicion is that there might be some resonances with our own motivations and practices.