[transcript]

In this Announcement podcast of Screen Space I invite you to join me for Scholarly Writing Month (or your alternative).

[music]

This is a special edition announcement episode of Screen Space your podcast about creating usable, accessible, effective, and efficient web, blog, and new media design for the everyday (and non-expert) designer.

As many of you know, I, your host, Dr. Jennifer L. Bowie, am a professor at Georgia State University. As such I have to publish or perish and scholarly publications are a major focus of my pre-tenure life.

I invite those of you in academia to join me for something I am trying in November: Scholarly Writing Month (or SchoWriMo). For those of you who are not academics, sick around and consider joining this adventure in your own way.

This short podcast is an abridged version of my longer invitation and discussion of this idea I posted on Screen Space. Go to Screen Space Click on the SchoWriMo category link to find the longer post or look around the blog.

November is "National Novel Writing Month" where participants try to write a novel (defined as 175-pages/50,000-words) during the month. As an academic, this concept always intrigued me, but didn't work for me (see the blog post for why not).

So, I have previously not joined the crazy fun of Nanowrimo. However, this November I propose a scholarly version: Scholarly Writing Month (or SchoWriMo)

What is SchoWriMo, you may ask?

The goal is to spend serious time in November writing. As many writers of scholarly texts, novels, or other forms will state, the most important thing one can do as a writer is write regularly. So, SchoWriMo is based on this general concept: writing regularly. There are thirty days in November, so I propose an hour a day or at least thirty hours of writing for November. Since the idea is to write regularly, one should not just sit down in 3-4 days and pound out 30 hours. Ideally this will be an hour a day, 7 days a week, for November. Thanksgiving and other days may come up when writing is particularly hard, so, how about being able to make up one day/hour of writing on any other day, but no more than one? This means if someone needs to make up for the Thanksgiving hour, they can spend two hours the day before, but can't spend three that day to also cover the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Types of writing: What counts?

Actual writing: obviously

Data analysis

Formatting the document

Putting together and formatting the references pages

Anything that contributes to a scholarly publication: As the goal is to get work done on a scholarly publication I will not count blogging, writing for classes I am teaching, or anything else that doesn't lead to further development of my scholarly contributions to the field (as counted by my tenure guidelines).

For students, I would not recommend including writing for class unless it is a paper or project that you plan to publish or present at a conference. Your writing too should be something that works towards a scholarly publication--a line on the CV.

Medium/media are not important: If you are writing for a print publication, a hypertext, a video, or a podcast, this still counts as "writing", as I have loosely defined it here, as long as it moves your scholarship forward. For instance, I am working on an article I plan to publish in a peer reviewed journal and this article happens to be in podcast form. Writing the script for this, recording it, and editing it will all count as "writing" as it will move my scholarship forward.

Am I missing anything?

So, this is what I will be doing in November. For those of you who are academics, care to join me? For those of you are not, is there something else you could do instead? Perhaps there is a project you are working on--say a quilt--and you could do QuiSewMo. Or perhaps you play an instrument and should practice an hour a day? Or maybe you have a blog you need to blog more on, and want to try blogging a hour each