Academic Writing

Academic writing is what is expected of you such as when fulfilling the requirements of the PhD or other social science doctoral degrees. Many doctoral students believe they must use fancy language, big and impressive words, and technical terms to be considered academic writing. Many feel they are impressive with the excessive use of highly technical terms and excessive jargon, when instead, all that is required is being clear, pleasant, and concise. That is not so easy though, and that is not always the student’s fault. Unfortunately, many students get to the doctoral dissertation level and are very much untrained in academic writing skills. That’s because many are expected to pick up the skill along the way.  In future tips on academic writing, I will provide little tricks that can help you improve. In the meantime, I would like to address some issues that affect students getting their work done, most often related to time management.

Time Management

The first distractor and stealer of time is distraction (Text mgs., WhatsApp, Email, phone calls, people, hunger, boredom, frustration, you name it).

            Emails:

1. Don’t allow yourself to get distracted. Respond only to very urgent email, everyone else can wait.
2. Better yet, when you decide to study within a certain time frame, pretend you are on a flight and the captain said, put your devices on “airplane mode”. That means, no calls, emails, messages, or disturbances from your advices.
3. Study in the early hours of the morning (3am – 6am). That means, you alone will be up, and chances of getting disturbed remains low. If you plan to work on your research at night after your day is over, you may often find that your brain is tired, and absorption remains low.
4. If you think you will be hungry, get a snack or have a beverage on hand, prevents you from getting up to go get something and be distracted.

That’s it for now. In my next blog, I will explore some of the other thieves of time.

If I can ever help, please feel free to reach out to me.

Kindly,

Dr. D. Chris Alleyne

DBA-ISM, MBA-TM, BSBA-PM

Statistics, Research Design, Dissertation Expertise.

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