Category Archives: Tiny Text

a planner’s approach to the first draft

Posted on September 16, 2019 by

Writing a draft. Mmm. The word ‘writing’ suggests that all you have to do is sit down and type or scribble away. And lo and behold a text is born. But there are different pathways to writing a draft. Some … Continue reading →

Posted in academic writing, free-writing, looping, planning, planning a paper, poster, powerpoint, storyboard, storyboarding, Tiny Text, titles | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

patter is eight and celebrating with writing skeletons

Posted on July 8, 2019 by

Happy birthday to me July is patter’s eight birthday and this is my 784thpost.  That’s a lot of words. At about a thousand per post, well, there’s about ten books worth buried in this blog. I’ve had a bit of … Continue reading →

Posted in academic writing, sentence skeleton, Tiny Text, warrant | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

tiny texts – small is powerful

Posted on February 11, 2019 by

I work a lot with tiny texts. Abstracts. Storyboards. Story threads. Lines of argument. Tiny texts are my academic writing tool of choice. If I had to abandon all the other writing strategies I have in my repertoire, this is … Continue reading →

Posted in abstracts, academic writing, methods, methods chapter, research methods, thesis, Tiny Text | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

writing regularly – matching time and task.

Posted on August 6, 2018 by

You’ve all heard the advice that it’s good to write regularly. Perhaps it was phrased this way – productive writers write a lot because they write regularly. You’ve been told that you can get a lot done if you just … Continue reading →

Posted in academic writing, time, Tiny Text, writing regularly | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

writing course day two

Posted on April 4, 2013 by

We began today by looking at the abstract again – the Tiny Text – and then went on to think about titles. After some paired discussion of the potential titles and a bit of work on some volunteers’ abstracts and … Continue reading →

Posted in abstracts, introduction, Tiny Text, writing course | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

location – another metaphor for writing about your research

Posted on January 17, 2013 by

There are a lot of geographical metaphors used in research talk. We routinely speak about fields of study, mapping the literatures, surveying the literatures. Location is another one of those borrowed-from-geography metaphors and it’s one I‘m particularly fond of. Locating … Continue reading →

Posted in abstracts, academic writing, journal, literature review, location, metaphor, Tiny Text | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments