Clarity Doctors Writing Consultants

01/19/2024

What does it mean to work with us? You get a lifelong cheerleader--one who will help your voice to speak more clearly in writing!

Come meet us: email us at info[at]claritydoctors.com and let's schedule a complementary initial meeting to get a sense of each other!

Find more info at https://claritydoctors.com/editing/

At Clarity Doctors, we offer editing at all levels, from copyediting to developmental and comprehensive editing, and we specialize in editing PhD dissertations and Master's theses and long-form fiction. Contact us to learn more!

01/04/2024

Hi friends! Happy New Year! What are your writing and/or editing goals for 2024?

We're working on some exciting content to support academic writers! Watch this space and our LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/company/clarity-doctors-wc/) for content to support our academic author friends, colleagues, and comrades!

07/21/2023

A mini-essay on things to be aware of if pursuing a career in academia, with an eye to structural issues, approached not as an unchangeable monolith, but as conditions that need considerable work to change.

A survey of the issues that academics must navigate to succeed in academia on their own terms

07/12/2023

Sometimes, the solitude of academic writing gets overwhelming. Do you ever wonder how much of your trouble focusing on writing and its attendant pieces (including reading, rewriting, editing, and pacing around the room) is just you being your unique self and how much of it is a broadly shared experience amongst our fellow academics?

Well, a few weeks ago, Alex went on an academic writing retreat and wrote up his observations as an editor and as an academic author.

It's so important to normalize our writing experiences and the very real struggle that producing academic work represents for many of us!

Read the full blog post here: https://claritydoctors.com/an-editor-goes-to-a-writing-retreat/

We're glad to be in the trenches with writers so this week we're sharing some field notes, like anthropologists

07/10/2023

In this post, we reflect on the fickleness of motivation. While it’s often possible to adjust to natural fluctuations of energy, sometimes motivation disappears altogether, as a package—we can’t do the task, can’t adjust, and sometimes can’t even reflect on what’s going on. In other words, just like sailors, sometimes we writers find ourselves becalmed despite our best plans: the doldrums wallop us!

How we think, feel, and act in those moments can make all the difference in getting back to writing, or at least feeling OK about ourselves and our fickle capacities. So let’s drill down!

Read the full blog post here:

This week we’re reflecting, as we often do, on the fickleness of motivation. While it’s often possible to adjust to natural fluctuations of energy, sometimes motivation disappears as a package—we […]

07/09/2023

It's hard to believe that we're already this far into July! Today is, after all, July 9th. So, I invite you, if you haven't already done so, to take between 5 and 30 minutes today and write out a quick reflection:

1. What's your main project right now?
2. How much time did you spend working on it this week?
3. How many spoons, or how much actual energy + available time did you have this week in which to do that work?
4. What support do you need today and over the course of next week to keep making progress on your main project?
5. Schedule in blocks where you think you may be able to realistically work on your main project over the course of this week.
6. Break the progress you plan to make during those time blocks into 30-60 min. pieces and add them to your calendar's notes, so that you know how you'll try to focus your attention and efforts during those blocks over the coming week.

If you'd like more ideas, check out our blog post on SMART (an acronym that stands for "Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound") goals, linked below.

And please get in touch with us if you need any support with your writing project's management, goal-setting, and navigating the emotional, temporal, and/or strategic roadblocks that you're writing in spite of these days! We're here to help, and this is one of our areas of expertise.

Read our post on setting SMART goals here: https://claritydoctors.com/smart-goal-setting-for-the-new-year/

-Setting

A reflection on how to make New Year's writing aspirations a reality through SMART goals, dedicated writing time, and kindness.

07/08/2023

This week's post: academia, self-care, and community care. The take-home message: you can't have one without the other. And we're bad at talking about community care.

Self-care is important, but community care often makes self-care possible, and we aren't as good at talking about it

07/05/2023

You know that feeling where you sit down to write and are overcome by "UGH!", or where you don't even manage to sit down to start writing at all because of the overwhelming dread? So do we.

While there are loads of good productivity techniques out there, many of them oversimplify the process, and some are filled with toxic positivity. We don't subscribe to toxic positivity (the "toxic" part is, of course, naming the issue with that brand of thinking). Instead, in this blog post, we share one of the more counterintuitive productivity techniques for working with the "UGH" or the dread that you may feel about having to write, because trying really counterintuitive things drops us into the reality of the writing process effectively.

https://claritydoctors.com/working-with-ugh/

Working with stuckness that resists the usual productivity techniques by trying to make things worse

07/03/2023

We often offer tips, tricks, tools, and discussions of basic decency and kindness to help writers. This helps some people, but not others. Depending on who’s reading, any given tool might come across as obvious, preachy, condescending, toxically optimistic, excessively negative, or, somehow, all of those things at once! Good advice is often only good advice when we’re ready to hear it.

So we’re trying something else. We’re starting a series called “Yes, but How?”, which will focus on deep-diving into subtleties and complexities of good advice. In essence, it’s us nerding out about concepts, frameworks, and practicalities of how to do the things. We hope this will help writers tweak tools to their needs.

This week, let’s talk about mindfulness.

Read the post here:

Mindfulness is good. Writing is good. Bringing mindfulness into writing takes discernment, individualization, and a DIY mindset.

07/01/2023

A somewhat deep dive into bringing mindfulness and writing together. The take-home message: bringing mindfulness to writing is individual and looks different for different writers.

Mindfulness is good. Writing is good. Bringing mindfulness into writing takes discernment, individualization, and a DIY mindset.

06/23/2023

Initial thoughts about the publication of the ISO Plain Language Standard and what it means for academic editing.

Thoughts and comments on the move to standardize the meaning of plain, clear writing, especially in academia