2021 Textbook Excellence Award Winner (College: Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences)In this book Dr. Dannelle D. Stevens offers five key principles that will bolster your knowledge of academic writing, enable you to develop a manageable, sustainable, and even enjoyable writing practice, and, in the process, effectively increase your publication output and promote your academic career.A successful and productive book and journal article author, writing coach, creator of a nationally-recognized, cross-disciplinary faculty writing program, and with a long career as a faculty member and experience as a department chair, Dr. Stevens offers a unique combination of motivation, reflective practices, analytical tools, templates, and advice to set you on the path to being a productive and creative writer. Drawing on her experience as a writer and on her extensive research into the psychology of writing and the craft of scholarly writing, Dr. Stevens starts from the premise that most faculty have never been taught to write and that writers, both experienced and novice, frequently experience anxiety and self-doubt that erode confidence. She begins by guiding readers to understand themselves as writers and discover what has impeded or stimulated them in the past to establish positive new attitudes and sustainable habits.Dr. Stevens provides strategies for setting doable goals, organizing a more productive writing life, and demonstrates the benefits of writing groups, including offering a variety of ways in which you can experiment with collaborative practice. In addition, she offers a series of reflections, exercises, and activities to spark your writing fluency and creativity. Whether developing journal articles, book chapters, book proposals, book reviews, or conference proposals, this book will help you demystify the hidden structures and common patterns in academic writing and help you match your manuscript to the language, structures, and conventions of your discipline--be it in the sciences, social sciences, or humanities. Most importantly, believing that connecting your passions with your work is essential to stimulating your ideas and enthusiasm, this essential guide offers you the knowledge and skills to write more.
Dannelle D. Stevens is a tenured professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Portland State University in Oregon where she has been since 1994. Her roots, however, are in the public school classroom where she taught middle school and high school social studies, language arts, and special education for 14 years across four school districts and three states. She received her master's from the University of Utah in 1983, and a doctorate in educational psychology from Michigan State in 1991. Before coming to PSU she taught at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Whether the topic is rubrics, journal writing, action research or academic writing, her work centers on how adults reflect on what they do and, then, act on those reflections. One of Dr. Stevens' underlying assumptions is that cognitive, social and emotional development does not end with the teenage years but continues through the lifetime. Besides over 75 conference presentations, she has written three books, all designed to impact development of her fellow faculty and their students. Her first book, co-edited with Joanne Cooper, Tenure in the Sacred Grove: Issues and Strategies for Women and Minorities, (SUNY Press, 2002), was written to help faculty women and minorities negotiate the path to tenure. Introduction to Rubrics, now in its second edition, and co-authored with Antonia J. Levi, and Journal Keeping, co-authored with Joanne Cooper, are both published by Stylus Publishing. In addition to teaching classes, she has taken on leadership positions in the department and campus-wide. In the Curriculum and Instruction Department, Dr. Stevens leads teacher licensure cohorts and coordinates the MA/MS program for experienced teachers. For the university at large, she works within the Center for Academic Excellence as faculty-in-residence for assessment. She is chair of the Institutional Assessment Council. Stephen D. Brookfield is Distinguished Scholar at Antioch University, Adjun
