Walden University Writing Center

Where instructors and editors talk writing.

By Amber Cook, Senior Writing Specialist

For those of us in the writing world, November means NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). During this month, aspiring novelists commit to writing 50,000 words in 30 days, with the goal of completing a novel in raw form. Several of us in the Writing Center decided to give it a try this past year, myself included.

Let me first say that I am NOT a fiction writer. My only long-term writing project was a master’s thesis for a musicology degree. I hadn’t written fiction since the fourth grade, when I wrote and illustrated Betsy and the Magic Fish (a little stapled-together book for which myself and my mother were the only readers). So when I decided to start NaNoWriMo, I felt like a fraud immediately. Writing in third person felt odd. Developing characters, settings, and plots was totally new to me. To keep up with the word count demand, I also had to fight the natural editor’s urge to slow down and refine every little nuance as I went. Everything about NaNoWriMo was uncomfortable at first, like trying to brush your teeth with your nondominant hand.

The experience has helped to give me more sympathy for so many of the adult learners I work with at Walden. Many students returning to academic life will report similar fish-out-of-water feelings when faced with scholarly writing assignments. Fiction for me, and academic writing for many of you, has a foreign set of conventions and assumptions that can be awkward at first. The next time I’m talking with a student about making the transition to a new style of writing, I will remember staring at my first blank page, wondering why I ever thought I could write a novel, and immediately understand.

I learned a few things about writing during this experience that I thought I’d share.

1. Peer pressure is very powerful. NaNoWriMo sets up a “buddy” page where you can load your page output each day and compare it to those of your friends who are also participating. That was the only thing that kept me going some nights. See if you can find a peer in your program who could do the same for you.

2. It helps to end each writing session by writing a sentence or two about what comes next. That way, when you return to your paper, you’ll have a little help getting started.

3. Output accountability helps keep you honest. If you’re the kind of person who thinks you’ll get to it later, you might benefit from an online reminder system that tracks your progress and lets you know how much writing you need to do each day to meet deadlines. NaNoWriMo had a great tool like this, but there are others, such as Write or Die and the dissertation calculator.

4. It’s important to be gentle with yourself without letting yourself off the hook. It’s OK to have a few unproductive days, but it’s easy to slide off the writing wagon quickly if too many days go by. Beating yourself up doesn’t help; just get back to the computer and forge ahead.

Now that 2011 is here, you might want to consider January your personal writing month. Make some goals, find a buddy, challenge each other, and write on!

By Sara Culver, Writing Specialist

Need a fast route to scholarly writing success? These tips should get you on your way.

1. Use standard formatting. Wing-dings are fun, sure, and who doesn’t like a customized title page? All that fancy formatting, however, can easily overshadow your ideas. Readers who are used to a standard format may be distracted or confused by too much pizzazz. Keeping things professional—using 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced lines, and APA templates—ensures that your original analysis stays front and center.

2. Take a trip to the library. No matter what stage of writing you’re in, a trip to the library can help. Brainstorming topics? The library has broad overviews of any subject you might choose. Refining your thesis? Librarians can point you toward articles to help shape your argument. Think you’re ready to get published? Back issues of journals at the library can help you decide where to submit your manuscript.

3. Pick the weird (or challenging) topics. Scholarly writing should advance new and original analysis, research, and ideas. That task is sometimes easier to accomplish when you’re writing on a less-popular topic. The next time all your classmates are writing about substance abuse or No Child Left Behind, branch out—it’s likely there are many areas in your field that will allow you to make a new contribution.

4. Ask for help. If you ever have a question or a concern about a writing assignment, don't be afraid to email your instructor, a classmate, a librarian, or a writing tutor. The worst thing that can happen is that the person you emailed will point you to a better resource. The best thing that can happen is the person will be able to help you and will remember you as a motivated, engaged student.

By Beth Oyler, Writing Tutor

For many of us, the hardest part of the writing process is organizing our information. You’ve done all the research, taken copious notes, and now know a lot about your topic (maybe too much); what do you do now? I often find myself simply staring at the blinking cursor of my blank Word document. When the number of my sources has reached the double digits, I tend to freeze. For some of you who are like me, Writer’s Café may help solve this problem.

In a recent blog post for The Chronicle, Billie Hara reviewed Writer’s Café, a program to help writers keep track of the information used in a project. As Hara reports, Writer’s Café was originally created for fiction writers developing their characters and storylines, but it can easily be used by scholarly writers who would like a little help organizing papers both small and large. As a writer who could certainly use some help in this area, I was intrigued and thought I would see how well Writer’s Café translates to scholarly writing.

Hara discusses all of the Writer’s Café tools in detail, but the Storylines tool seems to be the most helpful in academic writing. If you are early in your writing process, you can put each topic on a note card and then play with the order. This function can aid writers who are having trouble with the overall organization of their paper. The note cards can also be used to represent each paragraph. As you write your paper, you can fill in the information you’d like to discuss. The note cards have the capacity for as much information as you’d like to add, so you could even list all of the sources you’d like to use in that particular paragraph. Or you could use each chapter to represent a paragraph and then use each note card to represent a sentence or source you’d like to include in that paragraph.

So far, I’ve discussed the Storylines tool as it could relate to a paper that doesn’t have chapters. Where it really gets fun is if you used Writer’s Café to write a dissertation or doctoral study. With the ability to add multiple chapters, writers have the freedom to organize their entire dissertation. Each chapter can be organized into the various sections and topics that you’d like to discuss, making outlining your dissertation much easier.

As you'll see, Writer’s Café isn’t perfect. Because it is geared toward fiction writers, it might not work effectively for all scholarly writers. But if you’re a visual learner, Writer’s Café could be a great way to visualize the structure of your paper.

Although Writer’s Café is for PC users, Mac users do not fear. According to a few reports, the comparable Mac program, Scrivener, is much more user-friendly (Ryan Cordell, who reviewed the program for The Chronicle, says that it “changed the way I think through, organize, and perform my professional writing”). One advantage that Scrivener offers is its ability to store research (including PDFs, Word documents, audio and visual files, and Web pages). Scrivener is also able to display the research alongside your paper. Another advantage of Scrivener is that it is geared toward academic writing instead of creative writing, allowing its functions to handle the amount of research you might have for a dissertation. Cordell discusses many other features of Scrivener in his blog, and I’ll admit that I’m pretty jealous.

Bottom line, there are some great programs out there to help you organize your academic writing—for both Mac and PC users. These are only two programs that were featured in The Chronicle; I’m sure there are others. If you’ve used one of these programs, or a different program altogether, let us know! We’d love to hear about your experiences. Feel free to leave us a comment so other writers can learn from your experience or send us an email at writingsupport@waldenu.edu.

By Hillary Wentworth, Graduate Writing Tutor

Do you ever ask yourself how you wound up here, writing scholarly papers and worrying about serial commas? Staying up late at night agonizing over whether to use “et al.”? Well, I do. You see, I’m a creative writer and I often find it hard to switch between my artistic endeavors and my academic pursuits. Imagination and creativity—traits that put you ahead in other areas—don’t necessarily translate to a scholarly venue. Lately students have been asking for tips to make this transition into academia. There are indeed ways to keep your creative “you-ness” and still write in the formal style expected of scholars.

1. Theme-ify it. Your paper doesn’t have to be stuffy summary—in fact, it shouldn’t be. Just as creative writing follows thematic lines, so should your academic writing. As you read, make note of the themes that emerge in the literature and consider organizing your paper around them.

2. Relate it to real life. Creative writers are told “write what you know." However, I encourage all writers to give real-life examples to illustrate the points they make. This could be a situation in your own classroom or business that highlights a certain theory, for instance.

3. Look it in the I. Both Walden and APA allow you to use the first-person “I” in your assignments and capstone projects. This gives a personal tone to your paper, eliminates the awkward “this author,” and asserts your control over the narrative. If you’re used to expressing how you feel and what you believe, though, rein in the impulse to provide opinion. You are a scholar and your writing should be based on evidence.

4. Turn it around. Similes and metaphors, the beautifiers of creative writing, are not accepted in scholarly writing because they can be vague and confusing. If you normally like to make connections through analogy, that impulse is correct: the topic probably needs further description. It is your job now to explain it in clear, concise language.

5. Write it out. Sometimes you just have to give in to the creative spirit. If you’re reading a scholarly journal and it gets your poetic juices flowing, sit down in a quiet spot (not at your computer) and write a poem about it. Then go back to your computer and start fresh. You might find that writing creatively has given you a new perspective on the topic that you can use in your scholarly paper.

6. Deal with it. One of my greatest discoveries as a creative writer was how to flourish under constraints. It can be yours too. Challenge yourself to work within the boundaries of APA, and you will reap the rewards.

By Timothy McIndoo, Dissertation Editor

I recently learned about two productivity tools that can be useful in doing research. One highlights, while the other reveals deeper content without leaving the Web page.

Back in the day, researching the literature meant photocopying articles and then underlining passages with pen, pencil, or highlighter. I can recall typing up such passages (along with my notes). Today’s Web tools make such work much easier. For example, a software company, Diigo, has created an online highlighter that lets you use different colors to highlight text you read on the Web. It even lets you save all your highlighted text in one place. (It also lets you add permanent Stickies to a Web page.) If you think this might be useful in your research, visit the following page for further details:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/oojbgadfejifecebmdnhhkbhdjaphole. So far, however, it’s only available on the Google Chrome browser.


Performing searches on the Web just gets easier and easier. First there was the search tool embedded in the browser’s menu bar. But now Apture Highlights lets you search Google (as well as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Wikipedia) without leaving the screen you are reading—and without typing. Simply highlight the word or phrase you’re interested in and voila! Up pops a small screen with the search results, whether text or video or pdf. If you think this might be useful in your research, visit the following page for further details:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cppaadhnncohnjgallikmjdonfliciek.
This tool is available for three browsers: Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.