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quick thought writing

Comma Chameleon

I can’t spot my grammar mistakes until long after I’ve made them. Despite taking time and not just dashing out 500 words and hitting publish, I often find bad grammar in what I have created. Or, more typically, my wife spots it. The post that I did yesterday for Viva Survivors went live and I got it sent to me by email (I signed up for my own subscriber list; it helps me remember what’s going on when I’m busy). I scanned it quickly, thinking Yes, another post out there, another connection with- Wait what’s that comma doing there?

They blend in. The commas and the semi-colons lurk in among the words. They make sense in my head. I use them to create pauses or to moderate how I speak – which is how I write to an extent, sort of conversational-like. But it does mean that I risk creating confusion. I want my writing to be conversational, fun, informative, challenging – but not challenging because people are really working to parse things. I think my biggest problem with writing is my own self-belief in what I am doing, a kind of sabotaging impostor syndrome. Not too far behind that is missing the commas, the parentheses and the exclamation marks that just creep in the background.

I wonder what I can do about that. I want to read something about good grammar – which I think I know on some level, but don’t apply consistently – but maybe reading and trying to apply something isn’t enough. Does anyone out there have any suggestions for me? Have you built up good written grammar, and if so, how did you do it?

Thanks for reading.

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

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quick thought

Isn’t A Blog Supposed To Have Writing And Stuff?

Ideally…

A combination of things have meant that I’ve not been maintaining this space as regularly as I have in the past. Mostly due to focusing on other projects and getting things in order for the rest of this year. The kind of work that I do can have a certain seasonality to it, and my diary is pretty jam-packed for the next six or seven weeks.

I do plan to post something once per week or so from now on, but the topics will be quite wide for now. While I decided to stop a writing project that I had been working on (which might be the subject of a blog post of its own), I have not stopped writing. At the moment the ideas are fermenting away: at a certain point this mixture of thoughts will explode I’m sure, and I’ll be on my way towards my third book!

Until then, take a look back through the archives, get ready as the 50th episode of the Viva Survivors Podcast is coming soon, and I’ll be back soon with weekly posts.

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

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quick thought

Seven Years

I often think about my PhD as being one of the defining things that I’ve done with my life (thus far). It was a huge deal, doing research in that field, and I know that it’s something that has set me up for the rest of my life – good or bad!

But it was actually a long time ago now. For me, perhaps because of the kind of work that I do, it feels like it was much more recent, but I woke up today and realised that I’ve been in business for seven years now.

Twice as long as my PhD.

Like my PhD, it’s not what I thought it would be at the start, I’ve learned a whole lot of things that I never would have imagined. I break my working life up into smaller projects, but unlike the PhD I have no deadline for when this job will be done. It’s changed (most recently, the business became a partnership between me and my wife), and it will continue to change.

I love what I do. I grew into this job, thinking “I wonder…” and where I am now is completely different from where I was at the beginning. That’s no bad thing. I wonder what I’ll do next… Any ideas?

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought work

A Trip To London

Last Thursday I went down to London for the day. It wasn’t for sightseeing – thank goodness as the Tube was on strike – but to see Emma Cole who does the PhD Vlog, and chat with her about viva prep and other related things!

It was great to meet up with Emma after watching the final month of her PhD (leading up to submission) and after chatting with her via Twitter for a little while. I don’t want to say too much more about the trip, as the main output of it isn’t finished yet: Emma and I filmed a video for her vlog about the viva and viva prep!

Categories
quick thought writing

Summer Experiments

Through the end of July and August, when few of my clients want me to deliver workshops, I’ll be working on a new writing project – which I’ll announce properly some time in the next week! I need to produce about 35,000 polished words by the end of September in order to hit my goals, and have a series of first draft milestones spaced out over the next six weeks.

Throughout a big chunk of this time I’ll be writing most days about PhD matters – and so I think here on this blog I’ll take the opportunity to do something a little different as a creative outlet. I’ll still be writing something PhD-related, but it may be more of a piece of creative fiction rather than the non-fiction that I’ve been writing for the last year. I have a couple of ideas of the directions that might take and it may draw together some of my other interests as well.

Summer is a good time for experiments: I’d rather be cold than hot, but sunshine boosts me a lot! I feel like I can get a good routine going. I also know that there is going to come a point where I think “I need to be out there delivering workshops…” but I wonder if there is maybe something that I can do about that…

Anyway! Stay tuned over the summer for fiction, of a sort. A few more weeks of PhD musings and ideas.

What experiments might you try over the summer?

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

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quick thought

You Don’t Use Your Maths Any More, Do You?

A few days ago I was talking to someone about my work. They know me fairly well, so it came as a shock when they said:

“You don’t use your maths any more, do you?”

It really surprised me. They don’t see me every day, so how could they know what I do or don’t do?

I don’t follow the #postac hashtag a lot on Twitter, but I follow a few people who are involved and I wonder if this is a common thing if you finish a PhD/post-doc and then go on to do something outside of academia?

I suppose I felt a little judged as well. Which, on reflection, is odd! I’ve been doing what I do now for nearly seven years. I’ve been doing this longer than my PhD. I couldn’t do this without my PhD – my PhD was like start-up capital for this business. And not just in terms of experience with the area that I work in, important as that is, but in the intellectual capital that I accrued as well.

Some of that is totally maths-related. I analyse problems and make some decisions very quickly because I have a brain that is keyed up to look at things in a certain way. I look for certain types of information about a situation, because my experience – in maths – tells me what things are important to look for.

I guess… I guess I felt like perhaps I wasn’t being seen for something that I am. I’m not a mathematician, I don’t think, not any more. But I do use those tools, that mindset a lot. I’m sure I always will. I love maths, and I love solving problems with maths.

I’m happy using what I’ve learned, happy to be an a-math-teur. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought writing

Taking A Day Off

Thursday 11th June

I took a day off with my family. It was planned that we would go out to Liverpool to look around the Tate, taking the train whatever the weather, but as it turned out it was a gorgeous sunny day. Sunglasses all around for the three Ryders, and our daughter was especially enjoying the new places that we passed walking along the dock towards the gallery. It was around her snack time when we arrived, excited because this was the first time that we had taken her to a gallery.

We stopped for a cuppa, she ate her rice cake and drank some water…and promptly fell asleep.

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quick thought

Commitment and Starting

I spend a fair amount of time thinking up ideas. I have a hope and a goal to develop a kind of muse business, one that I can set up and let run, that will contribute to my family’s financial security. I want to explore new topics with postgraduate researchers, and to do what I already do with them better. And, as you can tell from this blog and my books, I want to write more books for postgraduate researchers (and possibly for other audiences too).

A big problem, one that I’ve carried over from my PhD days, is procrastination – well, not exactly. It’s a bit of procrastination, a bit of Imposter Syndrome, a bit of “what-if-this-doesn’t-work-out?” I worry. The key of it all is thinking: “What if this idea is not right?”

This is a perennial problem for me, but something that has helped a lot recently has been re-reading Poke The Box by Seth Godin, which I mentioned in a recent post. Previously, I would build up an idea, then stop, stop short of going through with it. What if it wasn’t right? I’ve had an idea for a new book – actually, for a series of books – and I thought that it was good. Great actually, if it’s OK for someone to say that about their own ideas!

And yet… What if it wasn’t right?

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quick thought

Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk

Today I want to share a video that I’ve found really helpful in the last few years. Amy Cuddy‘s TED Talk, Your body language shapes who you are, has had a big impact on how I go about preparing to present things. The idea that practising poses of confidence can help you to feel more confident is really intriguing – the fact that according to the evidence it seems to be a real effect is astounding.

The video is just below, and after that I’ll share how I use it in what I do.

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quick thought

Taking Your Own Advice

Whatever job you have, there are lots of things that you will recognise as being “the worst part of the job”. There’s never just one thing, there’s only whatever the thing is when you think of it. In what I think of as my day job, facilitating and delivering workshops to researchers, things that I have thought of as the worst part of the job have included:

  • interrupting people to move on to the next discussion/activity in a workshop;
  • travelling long distances;
  • being away from my daughter;
  • doubt about whether or not you’re connecting with a quiet room.

Today I have a new one: not taking my own advice.