[Writing Practice Series] How Long Does It Take To Change Your Writing Practice? [RE-RELEASE EP 189]

In today’s episode, I dive into how long it really takes to transform your writing practice as an academic. I explore how your approach to writing shifts throughout your career and share my timeline for building a more sustainable writing routine that supports consistent writing and increases your publications. I also highlight the tools and skills you can develop in our Navigate program, showing the impact it will have on your writing practice and career forever.

If you are ready to put writing at the center of your career or need help clearing your publication pipeline and know that improving your writing practice is an essential step in that process, this episode is for you. Tune in to learn how long it takes to change your academic writing habits and how Navigate can help you build a writing practice that supports your long-term success.

Changes to Your Writing Practice In Different Career Stages

For many academics, your writing practice is reactive. In graduate school, your writing practice is reacting to assignments and due dates for coursework. Whereas during a PhD program, your writing is less restrained, and you make it up as you go along. Your goal is to complete your dissertation, and you do whatever it takes to get it done. Then, when you reach a professorship, your career becomes much more complex. On top of writing and publishing, you are juggling teaching, research, faculty politics, and other obligations. Setting boundaries around your time and focusing on writing can seem impossible, and this is when changing your writing practice through professional development programs like Navigate becomes essential.

How Long It Takes to Change Your Writing Practice as an Academic

It takes 12-18 months to develop a sustainable, relationship-based writing practice. Many academics want change to happen quickly, but learning what to do and maintaining better habits over a short period is different than establishing a writing practice. Sustained, intentional action is the key to achieving long-lasting change.

The Navigate Program is a 12-week professional development program that coaches the tools and skills you need to master to change your writing practice. The goal of Navigate isn’t to provide an instant fix. Instead, the focus is on fostering a better relationship with your writing through:

• A benchmark assessment that allows academics to track progress
• Leveraging the “levels of awareness” framework in your writing practice so you can improve your writing, time, and project management skills from “unaware” to “mastery.”
• Practicing the Soaring System to optimize productivity and build resilience into your writing practice.

Navigate’s 12 weeks of structured support can kickstart progress, but the real transformation happens over a longer period. Academics can get continued support by participating in multiple rounds, allowing you to refine your skills and integrate new practices until they become second nature.

“The way that you have approached your writing when you were in graduate school should be different than how you are approaching writing now as a tenured or tenure-track professor. Much of that has to do with intentionality. So intentional change, intentional practice, and intentional action. A lot of times our writing practice is made up of our best guess, our gut instinct, our reaction to assignments that we have gotten or something that we have to do or a due date.” 

“My intention is to create a program that actually alters your writing and publishing practice forever and thus changes your career for the better forever. It won’t happen in 12 weeks. I think it takes 12-18 months.”

We’ve opened the waitlist for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and get on the waitlist here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Get on the waitlist here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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