Into the Driver's Seat

The unfortunate fact is that few of us ever really come to grips with what it means to study, apart from sitting by oneself with a textbook for hours on end. Despite its obvious inefficiency as a learning method, we’ve all found ourselves doing that kind of “studying” at one time or another. Having taught psychology classes for 40 years, Pierce College professor Marty Lobdell has seen thousands of students laboring, indeed suffering, under similar studying-related assumptions, and in his 8.7-million-times-viewed talk “Study Less, Study Smart,” he sets out to correct them. He has also dispensed his wisdom in a book by the same title.

Via Elizabeth E Charles, Dennis Swender

Most graduate writers who are struggling with their writing are actually struggling with their thinking. It isn’t a psychological block, but rather the intellectual confusions endemic to the process of communicating sophisticated research. To Rachael Cayley, these confusions are real and can have deleterious consequences for writing, but when we treat these problems as conceptual problems in our thinking we create the space to use writing as a strategy to solve them. The writer’s block label may just be further alienating us from our own writing; write your way out.

Via Elizabeth E Charles, Dennis Swender