Academic Writing Talk

The Toughest Fieldnote: On Achieving Justice in Ethnographic Writing

Yes, I’m back to making podcast episodes! This week, I’m reflecting on the toughest ethnographic fieldnote from my last book. (In honor of Carl V. Lewis.)

When is the Right Time to Write a Book? How I’ve Made This Difficult Decision

It's tough to decide when to embark on a long writing project! In this very personal episode, I talk about how I decided to write one book and not write another—at least, for now.

What Do You Mean? AI Writing Tools and the Problems They Create

In this episode, I talk about the problems of an over-reliance on AI writing tools. It’s led to what I’ve started to think about as a new genre of AI writing problems that academic authors should be aware of—but I rarely hear talked about!

The Publishing Challenges of International Book Authors

The Publishing Challenges of International Book Authors Dr. Aure Schrock Transcript: Good morning and welcome back to Academic Writing Talk, brought to you by Indelible Voice! I’m still Dr. Aure Schrock, your guide to academic writing and publishing. If you’re a professor based outside the US, I’ve been thinking about you lately! Because most of my editing hours are clocked on book projects! Just this year, I’ve worked on twenty different book projects, most of them for international clients. I’m a huge data nerd so I track all of my hours worked on different projects and how much I’ve invoiced for them. I thought it was about time that I produced an episode just about the needs of international clients who are thinking about publishing an academic book. So let’s get started!  My message is: international professors, don’t sell yourself short! US-based publishers are well aware of the need to diversify their publishing pipeline, and I don’t think there’s a stigma against being an international professor. This is true both demographically and intellectually; Non-Western approaches, Southern theory, and decolonial approaches are trending right now. And I always advise my clients to reach for top-tier publishers first! Unless time is really of the essence, you can always send your writing projects to second- and third-tier publishers later. However, rarely does that happen among the clients I work with.  With the right proposal and manuscript, most of them can secure a book contract in a top-tier publisher. Just to put some numbers on this, out of hundreds of clients I’ve worked with over the last six years, a grand total of one did not get their book published in the top three academic presses they targeted. So while it happens, it’s extremely rare, in my experience, if you know what you’re doing. That said, international academic writers do face different sorts of publishing barriers.  Over the last six years, I’ve worked with international clients working outside of the US—professors in the UK, Germany, China, and Australia—on their books and articles. Over time, I’ve noticed that they confront particular challenges when trying to publish in US-based book presses. These aren’t barriers intentionally imposed by press editors, who generally want to publish compelling scholarship. Rather, they exist due to institutional constraints and the way publishers have evolved. And this is just one point in time when the US is dominant in this area. For example, Germany at one point used to be an intellectual hotspot, and if you were seriously interested in sociology, you would be expected to read a book in the original German.  Academic publishing is a strange sort of business. Sometimes, my international clients find it challenging to understand how US-based academic publishers work. US-based book publishers often have unspoken expectations about what they want to see in a book proposal. And the “packaging” of a book proposal is everything! When it comes to the book manuscript, there are less and more compelling ways to sequence chapters and the paragraphs therein. This is the type of “gray-area” knowledge that’s tough to find online or in books, but I try to pick up wherever I can.  International authors can also encounter unexpected cultural barriers in publishing. International academics can even be working with an entirely different set of theories than my US-based clients, even if they’re in the same field! For example, “media studies” looks very different in Germany than it does in Australia, and some German publishers have a higher reputation in that country than in the US, among US-based academics. Even what qualifies as a top-tier publisher can be in the eye of the beholder—it can differ by country and institution. Understanding these differences in publishing cultures is vital for academics, because the last thing you want to do is waste your book manuscript on a publisher that won’t count for your tenure advancement.  Another common need among international academic authors—and this may have been what you thought of first!—is line editing by a native English speaker. There is still an unfortunate bias towards English-language proficiency in academia, maintained by disciplinary norms in the United States and expectations of reviewers. I don’t really think this is fair to international clients, to be clear, but realistically, if you’re trying to get a book published you need to be thinking about these things.  Particularly if you want to connect with a more general readership, you’ll need to think beyond “US English” and about if you prefer US idioms and a more colloquial writing style. However, cut-rate editors often lack the appropriate experience to hone language in this way. They might make decisions that don’t align with an author’s vision or make your writing voice sound wooden and artificial. That’s not what you want if you want to secure a more general readership! Instead you probably want an editor whose comfortable writing in a drier more analytical mode, but also slightly more conversational modes where you get some of those idioms and colloquialisms that characterize a more readable manuscript among a general audience.  Thanks for listening! If you’re a professor who would like more free content on academic publishing—I promise, your Dean will never know!—just go to indeliblevoice.com [http://indeliblevoice.com]. If you sign up for my free membership, you’ll get access to free videos and articles. I’m also here if you’re looking for an academic editor who works on these types of books, and also book proposal packets. I even have a set price packages for these services on my website right now! Until the next episode, happy writing, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Oops, am I Writing a History? On Different Interpretations of History in Academic Writing

Oops, am I Writing a History? On Different Interpretations of History in Academic Writing Dr. Aure Schrock Transcript: Welcome back to Academic Writing Talk, brought to you by Indelible Voice! I’m still Dr. Aure Schrock, here to guide you through the murky gray area of academic writing and publishing. The topic of today’s episode is history—what it is and whether you might accidentally be writing one. That’s what happened to me, and it took me a while to sort out what kind of book I was writing.  When I was writing my book Politics Recoded, I didn’t think of it as a history. Around 2012, I started to notice Code for America gaining prominence in non-profit organizing. I wrote a few book chapters, and thought that was the end of it. Honestly, at the time, it was just one of many tech-forward organizations. Then, around 2015, interesting developments began to occur within the organization, which helped it gain national prominence. Over the next few years, I started researching Code for America as part of a post-PhD research project. This research coalesced into chapter-length pieces of writing, each analyzing a part of the organization’s history. At one of their yearly meetings, a volunteer referred to me as “the institutional memory” of the organization, which frankly scared me.  So be more strategic and aware than I was ten years ago! I realized a bit too slowly that I was writing an organizational history! Today, as an editor, I find many of my book clients find themselves wondering if they, too, are writing a history—even if they didn’t intend to write one. This question was initially difficult for me to answer. However, after working as an editor for both historians and non-historians, some reasons for and against writing a history—and what “history” means anyway—became clear.  One reason you may find yourself accidentally writing a history is simply that time moves on. What you started researching ten years ago has changed in the time since. How academia regards the questions that your research once raised has probably also changed. An author must be aware of their intended audience and appeal to a publisher. For example, we’re about to be deluged with books on AI and large language models (LLMs). The questions researchers are asking of AI and LLMs now will be different from those researchers ask of these same technologies a decade from now. Put differently, what now feels new will become historical. As that happens, how we approach that phenomenon will change.  Alternatively, you could start out to write a history because that’s how you were trained. To make an obvious statement, historians are trained in history and set out to write histories. Their departments tend to value books rather than articles for career advancement. Historians also have specific notions of what history is and does. They are invested in the question of “what is history?” Some of my clients identify as historians and are professors in humanities disciplines. Unsurprisingly, they seek book publishers with a strong record in publishing history books, such as the University of Chicago Press and UC Press.  But clients in more technical or social scientific disciplines are less wed to the idea of history itself. To them, a history might be a way to tell a story or advance an argument. When writing Politics Recoded, what I wrote naturally became historical because I started writing about what was happening right in front of me. I didn’t (and still don’t) think of myself as a historian. Neither did I use traditional historical methods for research. You'd find me online or at a meeting, rather than buried in an archive. The book became both an organizational history and a vehicle for me to make arguments about the evolution of tech-forward organizing. But I’m not a historian; I’m a researcher of communication and technology. That orientation guides, more so, how I write my books.  What I’m saying is that if you’re using history as a narrative device or to advance an argument, that’s different than writing a history qua history. As long as you’re not publishing in a history-forward press or series, you can use history as a way to sequence chapters and make a powerful argument. For example, when I was working with Aaron Trammell on The Privledge of Play, we discussed how he was taking a “genealogical approach” to race in gaming. He wasn’t setting out to write a history of Dungeons & Dragons, although that ended up being one of his other books. This book was structured around moments when race in hobbyist gaming became salient. Such a “move” lets you off the hook for writing a genuine or complete history and protects you in advance from criticisms from historians.  If you find yourself writing a history, ask yourself whether you want to publish with a history-forward publisher or series. That should guide how you analyze your data and write the book manuscript itself. If you don’t have a strong opinion about history, particularly if you’re not a historian, you probably aren’t writing a “history qua history.” Instead, try to find a defensible position for justifying what you’re writing, and get on with it.  In my case, writing about the history of an organization gave my research an object of study and bracketed a time period. Pragmatically, it offered me as the researcher a through-line and a set of people to interview and do participant observation with. That specificity helped bound the research I was doing. If I were writing a different kind of book, perhaps an industry-wide or comparative one, I might have examined the tech-forward nonprofit industry as a whole, much as Caroline Lee did in Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry. However, I just wasn’t set up for writing that more diffuse kind of book. I didn’t have data on those people or organizations, and I had already struggled to find the story I wanted to tell. If I tried to write that kind of book, it wouldn’t have been very good.  At the end of the day, although people may very well argue about what history is, I don’t think the question of whether you are writing one is that complicated. Simply decide how ardent a stance you take on history, and what you are writing a history of. That should be determined by your disciplinary background, methodological tools, and target publisher and book series. Just don’t get bogged down in history!  If you’ll forgive the alliteration, one of my slogans as an editor is: “Write the book you can write, right now.” A good book is a written and published book. Remember Borges’ short fiction "On Exactitude in Science,” which uses maps to lampoon the idea of perfect accuracy. If you get too wrapped up in creating a perfect book that represents your subject, you’ll never finish working on it. Much like Borges’ map, you might be working on it forever. There will always be another archive to examine, person to interview, or place to visit. The seduction of writing a history is that there’s always going to be a nagging voice in your head telling you that it’s incomplete. And that voice is correct! You have to bound a history and accept that what you know is contingent on the materials you have access to and the ideas that you bring to the table. Historians are correct about this—history is, in a sense, alive and mutable. That’s what makes writing history a unique challenge.  Thanks so much for listening. If you'd like more free content on academic publishing or to explore how I can help you finish your academic book, just go to indeliblevoice.com [http://indeliblevoice.com]. If you sign up for my free membership, you’ll get access to free videos and articles. It’s a great way to start your fall on the right foot! Don’t forget to subscribe to Academic Writing Talk on your favorite podcast player. Until the next episode, happy writing!