28 days of #sciwrite

Back in November 2011, Anne performed an experiment. Anne wanted to see if being publicly accountable for my writing progress would get me to my goal of a paper submission before AGU. She didn’t quite make it, but that month of weekly check-ins and progress reports on the blog did get her a lot closer to that paper being drafted than she would have been without the #sciwrite challenge. More than 40 other blog readers also participated in the challenge, and at least a few actually got manuscripts and theses submitted in that month. Ever since #sciwrite, we’ve been thinking that we need to do it again.

If we’ve learned anything in our careers as academic scientists, it’s been the following:

1. Writing is the major metric of professional success and is the only way of making neat results in the field and lab into something useful for others.
2. All that academic advice about how writing every day is the only sustainable path to getting things done turns out to be true. Darn it.
3. Yet writing tasks can easily and repeatedly slip to the bottom of the to-do list because they don’t have the same urgency of deadlines imposed on them like teaching, review assignments, and the crush of email.
4. Loop back to #1.

With the idea that a little public accountability never hurt anyone, and that maybe having a community of people all going through the same writing process at the same time could actually help make life better, we’d like to introduce February 2014 as #sciwrite v 2.0. For the next four weeks, we’ll be committing to writing every day and sharing our goals and progress here on the blog on a weekly basis. We’d love it if other people joined us.

Anne’s goals:

• Two extended abstracts, shortly followed by two posters for the CUAHSI/USGS workshop on laser specs in hydrology. Abstracts are due February 17th, posters are due the 24th, and a virtual poster session will be held on February 28th. I’m the lead on one poster, and an undergraduate student is the lead on the other.
• For a paper in which the setting, methods, and results are already written, I’m going to make publication-ready figures, and write the introduction, discussion, and conclusions, with the help of a co-author.
• For a paper in which my co-authors and I endlessly tinker and improve, I’m going to finalize my piece of the results and get the introduction written. More if possible.

Chris’s goals:

• My big goal is finally finishing the big New Zealand tectonics paper that I have started, tinkered with, restarted, and then let lapse again for rather longer than I care to admit. Let’s just say that if I achieve my target of getting a completed first draft to my co-author by the end of the month, they’ll probably die of shock. It’s a challenging goal, so I’d be happy with ‘substantially completed’.
• I also want to write an internal grant application, due in the first week in March, for funding to substantially improve my Geophysics course before I have to teach it next.

If you are interested in participating in #sciwrite this month, leave a comment below with your goals, and if you’re on twitter, use the #sciwrite hashtag to share your progress. Then check in on the blog every Saturday for more encouragement.