Happy August!

Hello again! I hope you are all having enjoyable and productive summers. I am happy to be back at work after a relaxing vacation, and I am particularly happy to be back to thinking about this blog; being away from it for a whole month has given me a chance to reflect on how I want to proceed for the upcoming year. My plan is to keep the same basic format but to decrease the frequency of posts. As much as I love writing this blog, I am aware that doing so has diminished the time I have for other writing projects. Those writing projects need to get done for all the obvious reasons but also, I now realize, for the ongoing health of this blog. If I devote all my writing energy towards this blog, I am necessarily doing less conventional academic writing. Since conventional academic writing is what both my students and readers of this blog are likely to be doing, I need to be sure that my approach is informed by my personal engagement with that sort of writing.

So I will now post regularly on Wednesdays, alternating between posts on key topics in academic writing and posts with curated links about academic writing in its broader context. I will be back next week with some reflections on addressing broad structural issues in academic writing. In the meantime, since everyone seems to agree that blogs benefit from ‘visually striking images’, here are some photos from a recent trip to Alaska. I know this is cheating—these images have absolutely nothing to do with academic writing—but I hope you enjoy them anyway!