Helen Sword

Bio

Helen Sword is Professor and Director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland, where she received the 2007 Teaching Excellence Award for Innovation in Teaching. Her books include Engendering Inspiration (Michigan, 1995), Ghostwriting Modernism (Cornell, 2002), Pacific Rim Modernisms (co-edited Toronto, 2009), Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard, 2012), The Writer’s Diet (Chicago, 2016), and Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard, 2017). www.helensword.com

Contributions

Processing the Writing Process

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My process of writing this blog post about the writing process was slow, circuitous, and emotionally fraught. I started out with a clear idea of my overall structure—or so I thought—but ended up abandoning it after several hours of drafting, redrafting, and repeated applications of my Delete key. Frustrated, I tried free-writing for twenty minutes: an unstructured word-dump to find out where “writing to think” might get me. Unfortunately, it got me nowhere. By that time I had already spent...

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writing