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Today I’m rewinding this gem from the archives! Last week I wrote about the idea that your book can’t exhaustively cover all the literature that the ideas you discuss touch, so I thought it would be a good time to recirculate this one.

The term "literature review" has become virtually synonymous with "knowledge gap identification" in a lot of current research. The scientific quest for discovery—the constant push to know what is unknown—likely started this trend. Nonetheless, the qualitative social sciences and, to a lesser extent, the humanities have embraced this approach, despite their fundamentally different epistemologies from the hard sciences. The social sciences and, on occasion, the humanities are now frequently attempting to fill gaps, to the point where the potential of literature reviews is limited to merely demonstrating the existence of the gap. This fits with a research pattern that is more concerned with filling a gap than with providing nuance about our cultural or social environments.

Do We Really Need to Fill this Gap?

Gap-finding literature reviews seem to be formed around an unspoken argument: “There’s a gap, and that’s why I’m doing this study.” But I’m not convinced that there’s always a compelling reason to fill a gap in the first place. Are all the gaps inherently worth filling just for the sake of filling them? Just because the literature review can prove a gap, should it? Is that enough?

For example, I have read many papers that study sexism in a specific sport and justify the study by saying no one has studied it in X sport, even though the sexist patterns identified in the research are nearly identical in many other sports. The gap is a technicality instead of an actual knowledge gap. Research projects focus on this technical gap but do not illuminate any compelling aspects of human culture or society. Look through the relevant research literature, and you will find study after study proving sexism in sports. Does it matter that no one has done a motocross sexism study if the results are the same as those in other sports?

These gap-focused literature reviews sometimes cite everything known about a topic, even if it does not directly support the paper's argument. The fear of potential critique may lead scholars to cite broadly, resulting in dry and densely packed sentences that merely justify filling the gap with a multitude of citations. If the only goal is to fill a gap, this strategy makes sense because you need to prove the gap exists. But this often makes for dull reading.

I think it’s important to broaden our perspective when approaching literature reviews. Consider literature as a participant in a larger intellectual dialogue rather than just a justification for a study. Our goal is not just to determine a narrow slice of knowledge but to contribute to the continuous growth and refinement of knowledge as a whole. This perspective helps us understand research's collaborative nature and the importance of building on our predecessors' work while allowing future scholars to build on ours.

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Let Your Argument Guide You

Rather than defaulting to “knowledge gap identification,” perhaps let your topic and/or argument guide your selection of what to include and exclude. Your literature review can draw upon ideas that ignite the work you’re doing and situate it within ongoing conversations.

Imagine yourself as an artist creating a mosaic. You carefully select and arrange each tile, considering its color, shape, and texture, to create a captivating and cohesive composition. Your literature review weaves together different sources, ideas, perspectives, and insights to create a tapestry that contributes to the scholarly conversation, much like a mosaic artist transforms individual tiles into a unified piece of art.

For example, let’s say you are a researcher interested in how people interact with digital technologies. Instead of focusing solely on identifying gaps in existing research, you include studies on the psychological impact of social media, philosophical reflections on the nature of online communication, and sociological analyses of virtual communities. Your literature review highlights the complex interplay between technology and human interaction by weaving together these disparate sources and highlighting nuances, controversies, and trends.

But What About Those Gaps?

Never fear, dear reader; I am not suggesting that all research should stop attempting to fill knowledge gaps—especially in the sciences and often in the qualitative social sciences—nor am I advocating that we abandon this type of literature review entirely. Rather, I am suggesting that we broaden the role and function of the literature review, especially in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.

But if you do identify a gap, you should justify why it should be filled. I appreciate how Dr. Julie Spray's (citing Judith Littleton) recently framed this idea in a tweet. She says,

Finding the "gap in the literature" isn't a helpful direction for developing a research question because there's no reason why the gap must be filled. The most helpful tip I received was "what are you unsatisfied with the knowledge about?" Sparked a forever quest for satisfaction.

By rephrasing the gap question, we can dig deeper and identify what may need to be filled the most and instead use literature reviews to support why knowing what lies beyond that gap is important in the first place.

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Greetings, my dear writing circle!

For two and a half years, you’ve shown up here every week: naming what you hoped to write, then coming back days later to tell the truth about how it actually went. I’ve gotten to sit with all of it, the weeks the words came easily and the weeks they didn’t come at all, and somewhere inside …

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Much of your writing days will be insignificant, banal, or feel like you are going in circles. Yet, when one writing session becomes the referendum on whether years of work on your book or article were worth it, the work is buried under all that weight, and we start requiring impossible conditions before we’ll let ourselves begin to write.

I talk through why “I don’t feel like writing” and “I can’t write today” are two different sentences, even though we treat them as the same one, and what it looks like to let a session be ordinary instead of steeped in ceremony.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that anyone should push through exhaustion, grief, or genuine distress, because there’s a difference between dealing with life stress and managing feelings about writing. I’m talking about the smaller, more common friction: boredom, the dread of opening the document, the sense that we’re not ready or clear enough yet. You don’t need inspiration to write. Instead, inspiration comes through the act of writing itself.

I walk through a few ways to shrink a writing session down to something you can start before you feel like it and why repeated, unglamorous contact with a project does more for it than waiting for the beautiful, spacious afternoon. I hope you find my musings useful!

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One of the most exhausting parts of writing an academic book is the feeling that every term you use opens a door into another room you are now obligated to enter, map, furnish, and explain.

You write one sentence about embodiment, affect, neoliberalism, race, archives, genre, the public sphere, or whatever term your project requires, and suddenly the sentence no longer feels like a sentence. It feels like a summons. Behind that one word is a laundry list of literature, and behind that literature is more literature, and behind that is the imagined figure of a reviewer who knows all of it and is waiting, red pen in hand, to discover that you do not.

This fear is not irrational because academic writing does ask us to know things. It asks us to enter scholarly conversations with care, to avoid lazy citations, to recognize that terms have histories, and to be honest about the intellectual company we are keeping. Most of us have also been trained on the front lines, explicitly or not, to experience gaps in our reading as exposure because reviewers can be sharp, territorial, and weirdly punitive.

So the desire to read one more book, follow one more footnote, and make sure we have not missed the person who will later be treated as the person we obviously should have cited comes from somewhere real.

But the problem is that the task quickly becomes impossible.

• No academic book can fully account for every conversation its key terms touch.

• No introduction can do justice to all the literature adjacent to the project.

• No chapter can pause, every few pages, to demonstrate comprehensive mastery of every concept it borrows, modifies, or passes through.

If we ask the book to account for everything expansively, we do not make it more rigorous. We make it less readable, less coherent, and often less honest about what kind of intervention it is actually making.

We also make the book less writable because we spend so much time reading that our writing progress slows.

This is especially hard for book writers because books are capacious. A journal article usually has to announce its limits fairly quickly. It has a narrow argument, a relatively bounded archive or case, and only so much room to move. A book, by contrast, can hold more: more history, more texture, more conceptual movement, more detours that become part of the architecture.

That spaciousness is one of the pleasures of the form, but it can also trick us into thinking that because the book can hold more, it must hold everything. The manuscript starts to feel like a place where every intellectual debt must be paid in full, every term must be defended, and every possible readerly objection must be anticipated before it has even been made.

There is a difference, though, between responsible engagement and comprehensive coverage.

• Responsible engagement means helping the reader understand where your thinking comes from, how you are using the concepts that matter, and why the particular conversations you have chosen are necessary for this book’s argument.

• Comprehensive coverage means trying to prove that you have mastered every field your project brushes against in the hopes of bulletproofing yourself from critique.

Responsible engagement is part of scholarly writing. Comprehensive coverage is closer to a fantasy of invulnerability.

I know that fantasy well because I’ve experienced it myself. It often appears at the very moment when my project is beginning to take shape and I can finally feel the argument becoming clearer. Instead of trusting that clarity, my mind starts scanning for what is missing. What about that debate I only half remember? What about the theorist everyone cites? What about the neighboring field whose scholars might object to the way I am using a term? What about the reviewer who says, “This book fails to engage…” and then names a literature I have not adequately addressed?

At that point, “I should add a source here” can easily become “I need to understand the entire conversation before I am allowed to proceed.”

The first thought may be useful. The second is usually a deep rabbit hole. It turns a specific writing problem into an infinite reading project. It also mistakes the feeling of vulnerability for evidence that the manuscript is underdeveloped. Sometimes overwhelm does mean that the project needs more conceptual work. But sometimes it means something much smaller and more manageable: the argument needs selective bracing.

Selective bracing is different from expansion. It does not ask you to rebuild the frame of the book every time you notice a possible gap. It asks you to return to the pages you already have and identify the places where a reader might reasonably need orientation. Where might someone ask,

• Where is this term coming from?

• Where might they need to know that you are aligning yourself with one usage of a concept rather than another?

• Where would a sentence become more trustworthy if you named one or two scholars whose work supports the move you are making?

• Where does the reader need a footnote, a clause, or a short paragraph, not a new section?

This is a question of proportion. Some literature deserves sustained engagement because it is central to the book’s argument. Some need to appear because they clarify your method, your archive, or your conceptual vocabulary. Some belong in a footnote because they acknowledge a connection without pretending that the book is entering that debate in a major way. And some do not need to appear at all, even if they are interesting, even if they are adjacent, even if another scholar could plausibly bring them into the conversation.

Academic writing requires choices, and choices always produce exclusions.

That last sentence can be surprisingly hard to accept. Many scholarly writers carry the hope that if they read enough, they can make the work criticism-proof. But no book is criticism-proof.

A reader can always say you should have done more with a particular set of literature, framed a concept differently, taken another archive into account, or spent more time with a debate that mattered deeply to them. Sometimes that reader will be right. Sometimes they will be partly right. Sometimes they will be asking you to write a different book.

Your task is not to write the book that no one could possibly object to. Your task is to write the book whose intellectual commitments are clear enough that a reader can understand what it is doing, why it is doing that, and how its choices serve the argument. That means you do not have to read everything before you can write something. But,

• You do have to read enough to make the argument responsibly.

• You do have to know which conversations are load-bearing and which are merely nearby.

• You do have to signal your choices with enough care that the reader does not feel abandoned or misled.

But that is a more bounded task than mastering every discourse your language might invoke.

One useful question, then, is not “Have I read enough to enter every conversation this book touches?” That question will almost always produce panic, because the answer will always be no.

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The better question is, “What does the reader need in order to follow and trust the argument I am actually making?”

This question does not let you off the hook. It may still require more reading, more citation, more precision, and more careful explanation. But it changes the nature of the work. Reading becomes attached to a writing need rather than an ambient sense of scholarly inadequacy.

This shift is important because academic book writing already asks so much of us. It asks us to sustain an argument over years, to tolerate uncertainty, to make decisions without knowing exactly how the finished thing will be received. If every possible gap becomes a reason to stop writing and return to the literature, the book begins to recede from you. It becomes the thing you will write once you are finally prepared, once you have finally read enough, once no one can catch you not knowing something. But that moment does not arrive. The book gets written through the process of deciding what the book is responsible for and what it is not responsible for.

There is humility in that decision, not negligence. To say “this is the conversation my book needs” is also to admit that the book is not everything.

It is not the final word on every concept it uses. It is not a complete intellectual history of every term that appears in its pages. It is one sustained intervention, built from particular materials, questions, methods, and commitments. The work of revision is not to make it omniscient. The work of revision is to make its choices legible.

So when you feel the familiar urge to read everything before you continue, pause before obeying it. Go back to the page. Ask where the reader genuinely needs support. Add the source where the argument needs grounding. Add the footnote where the connection should be acknowledged. Add the paragraph where a concept is doing enough work that it deserves more explanation. But do not let every key term become a portal into years of additional reading.

You are not being examined on every field adjacent to your book. You are guiding a reader through the argument you came here to make.

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Leave it to academia to make us think we are all meant to be islands.

When I’ve been working on my own writing, deep into a chapter I can’t get right, I spend weeks circling the same problem by myself. Rereading it. Reorganizing it. Convincing myself that if I just thought about it long enough, the answer would show up. Sometimes it did. More often, I was still stuck a month later—just more tired and more convinced that the stuckness meant something about me.

What I know now, both from my own writing and from years of working with scholars on theirs, is that the issue is a proximity problem.

When you’re the only person who’s in the manuscript, weighing a decision with no one to think it through with, of course it’s hard to see clearly. You’re too close to it, and that’s what can happen when you’re inside a project by yourself.

A second, informed perspective isn’t a shortcut, and it isn’t cheating. It’s often the thing that turns weeks of circling into a decision you can actually move on.

That’s why I’m offering the Book Strategy Intensive.

What is the Book Strategy Intensive?

This isn’t months of ongoing coaching. It’s focused, one-on-one help for the specific moment when you need to make a key decision or find momentum on your book and you don’t have anyone to make that call with.

Maybe you’re facing a decision you can’t quite make on your own—what to cut, what to keep, which direction to take the argument in. Maybe the project has stalled and you’re not sure why. Maybe you just got reviewer feedback back and don’t know where to start with it. Maybe you just need a clear plan and a second set of eyes at a moment when it’s otherwise just you and the manuscript.

Here’s how it works

1. Before we meet: Complete a set of reflection questions that help us understand your project, your current challenges, and the realities of your work and life.

2. 90-minute strategy session: Together we’ll identify what’s actually keeping the project from moving, clarify your highest priorities, and develop a strategy that’s actually yours to execute instead of something borrowed from someone with a different project.

3. The month that follows: You’ll have email access for questions, troubleshooting, and course corrections as you begin putting the plan into practice.

4. 60-minute follow-up session: About four weeks later, we’ll meet again for a 60-minute follow-up to refine the strategy, address new questions, and ensure you’re continuing to move forward.

We might work on questions like

• My book has stalled. Where do I start?

• I don’t know what deserves my attention next.

• I need to make an important decision about my project and don’t have anyone to think it through with.

• I’ve received reviewer feedback and need help making sense of it and deciding what to change.

• My writing practice has fallen apart, and I can’t figure out why on my own.

• I have a semester or sabbatical coming up and want a clear plan for using it well.

You’ll leave with

• Clear priorities for the next stage of your project.

• A decision you can actually move on.

• Greater confidence about where to focus your time and energy.

• A month of support while you put that strategy into practice.

Investment

$895 for clients using institutional funds

$795 or two monthly payments of $398 for self-paying clients

Apply Now!

You don’t have to have the whole book figured out to start here. You just have to be ready to stop circling one question and gain some clarity on it.

Fill out the coaching inquiry form to apply. I’ll follow up within 48 hours to ask more questions or confirm it is a good fit and tell you how to get started.

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Greetings, my dear writing circle!

For two and a half years, you’ve shown up here every week: naming what you hoped to write, then coming back days later to tell the truth about how it actually went. I’ve gotten to sit with all of it, the weeks the words came easily and the weeks they didn’t come at all, and somewhere inside …

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If that feeling found you, this episode is a continuation of that conversation, though it takes a different angle.

Rather than offering steps for getting back on track like the newsletter did, I want to shift how you think about the plan itself. This is the plan you built back when summer still existed as an idea rather than a lived, complicated season.

What would it mean to treat your summer writing plan less like a verdict on your seriousness as a scholar and more like a rough draft that has room for growth?

I’d contend that your plans weren’t wrong so much as incomplete. They didn’t account for how depleted you’d be after a punishing school year or the wedding and the visiting in-laws and the kid suddenly home from camp sick or the way “revise the chapter” turned out to be an entire ecosystem of rereading and restructuring rather than just one task.

In this episode, I make the case for treating your writing plan like a Google Doc instead of a PDF: something easily editable, something that absorbs what you’ve learned about your actual capacity rather than something you failed to live up to.

If your plan has gone quiet, this one’s for figuring out what it’s trying to tell you. And no, it’s not that you failed the plan; it’s that the plan didn’t account for your actual summer.

If you need help rebuilding that plan for what’s left of the summer, my 1:1 Writing Strategy and Structure Program could be your next step.

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Every year around this time, I encounter academics who wake up one day to discover that it's mid-July and they haven't made as much progress on their writing as they had hoped.

If that’s you, here’s a newsletter from the archives to help you get back on track!

Need even more help? Check-out my 1:1 Writing Strategy and Structure Program—built to regain focus, develop clarity, and accelerate momentum on your book project.

Many of us will wake up this week to find that it is mid-July and we have barely made any headway on writing the book this summer. That dreadful feeling will hit many of us sooner or later, depending on when our respective school years begin. It is normal to feel panicked when there is a big discrepancy between our plans and how things are actually going.

How did we get to July already? Where did June go? Do I really have only a month until the new semester? I need to start prepping for classes!

Falling behind on your writing goals can be frustrating, but dwelling on the past will not help you move forward. Here are three steps for getting back on track without beating yourself up over lost ground.

And if you live in the Southern Hemisphere or follow a different academic calendar, save this post for the middle of your next long school break.

Step 1: Have A Little Self-Compassion

Many of us enter the summer expecting to charge full speed ahead, even though slowing down is often necessary to avoid burnout. In my experience, a lack of productivity during the summer usually means we needed the time off. It is important to give ourselves that time.

As I have written before, imagine that you went outside and sprinted a mile as fast as you could. Afterward, most of us would pause, gasp for air, drink some water, and walk until we stopped sweating.

Yet we often expect ourselves to begin a research sprint immediately after completing a teaching or classwork sprint. We cannot expect to sprint again without adequate rest. Allow yourself to slow down and recover if you are tired from the semester.

Of course, knowing we needed rest does not necessarily free us from guilt, especially if we took more time off than we expected.

Instead of being hard on yourself, try showing yourself some compassion. When I am overly critical of myself, my partner sometimes asks what advice I would give to a client. She knows I will be much nicer to someone else than to myself. That perspective helps me relax and see myself with more kindness.

Self-compassion is not about excusing your actions or shifting blame. It is about offering yourself the same kindness and empathy you would give someone else who felt defeated.

Step 2: Appreciate Any Progress

Instead of dwelling on what you have not done, take a moment to appreciate what you have. Recognize any research you completed, ideas you generated, or lessons you learned from the obstacles you encountered. Your ideas may also have needed time to percolate, even if your main progress consists of thoughts you had in the shower rather than words on the page.

I find it more motivating to adopt a glass-half-full—or a “some Guinness left is better than no Guinness left”—attitude. Recognizing your progress makes it easier to set new goals without feeling that you first have to dig yourself out of a hole.

Step 3: Set Honest and Realistic Goals

Now revisit your writing goals and revise them based on the time you actually have left. Be honest with yourself: you cannot fit three months of work into one month.

Put an end to the grandiose thinking and commit to being practical about what you can accomplish. A smaller, more realistic plan will make the writing feel less daunting and give you a better chance of succeeding without carrying so much guilt.

These posts may help you reassess the time you have left and what you can realistically accomplish in that amount of time:

The key is to focus on the present and take small steps forward rather than dwelling on what might have been. Over the next month—or however long the remnants of your summer last—you can rebuild momentum and make meaningful progress toward your writing goals.

When You’re Not Sure How to Move Forward

Of course, setting honest and realistic goals is often easier said than done. It can be difficult to see what matters most when you are overwhelmed by everything you hoped to accomplish and the semester is already approaching.

My 1:1 Writing Strategy and Structure Program is designed to help with exactly that. We will determine the highest-impact next steps for your project, build a manageable plan for moving forward, and create a strategy for transitioning into the fall without letting the writing disappear again.

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We’re told our dissertations need it, our articles need it, our books need it, and somewhere along the way that reasonable expectation curdles into something much heavier, the sense that we need to produce an idea that has never existed in anyone’s mind before ours.

In this episode, I want to push back on that definition and offer something I find far more workable.

Scholarly originality is more often achieved by building on existing ideas that emerge through relationships, applying a familiar theory to an unfamiliar archive, or noticing and bringing to the forefront a pattern that everyone else has ignored.

A topic no one has studied is not the same thing as a contribution, and a well-trodden topic can still hold real insight if you’re asking a sharper question or reframing the stakes.

Give the episode a listen, and see whether relation, rather than invention, gives you a little more room in your quest for originality.

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Greetings, dear readers! This week I’m rewinding a post from the archives in case you missed it last time around.

Academic writing often gets the rap for being dry, esoteric, and dense. We pack jargon and theoretical terms into complex sentences but rarely stop to think about the experience of being a reader. Journal articles are expected to be dense, to pack a punch, and to reference many important ideas that came before ours, so sometimes we don't feel we have enough word count to tell stories or to add flourish.

Long ago, one of my favorite academic writers, Ralina Joseph, taught me that it is much better to “show” rather than to “tell.” That lesson continues to pay dividends in my own writing and is what I am sharing with you today.

The Power of "Show, Don't Tell"

The phrase "show, don’t tell" is practically gospel in creative writing circles, but Ralina convinced me that it has enormous value for academic writers as well. When we "tell," we simply state facts or conclusions. When we "show," we provide concrete evidence that allows readers to experience our ideas. As Anton Chekhov famously wrote, “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Example One

Let’s say you’re writing about the concept of “affective labor” in social media—how influencers and even academics are expected to package their personalities for public consumption. Instead of writing:

The contemporary knowledge worker is enmeshed in networks of affective labor, wherein the performative self becomes a commodifiable entity.

You could show what this means with an example:

A postdoctoral researcher meticulously curates their Bluesky profile, highlighting achievements, presentations, and collaborations, while engaging warmly with comments to enhance their well-networked image. The emotional and intellectual effort required to maintain this online persona is affective labor—unrecognized but critical for professional visibility—that they regard as a time-consuming but necessary step toward obtaining a tenure-track job.

Suddenly, the reader isn’t just nodding along; they see the concept at work in a real-world scenario.

Example Two

Or maybe you’re writing about Foucault’s idea of discipline and control. You could write:

Institutions exert power through subtle disciplinary mechanisms that produce docile bodies.

A clear, compelling example does a lot of work to make the writing clearer for the reader:

A university classroom shapes behavior before the professor speaks, with rows of desks indicating authority. Discipline is reinforced by unspoken norms such as the act of silencing phones, sitting upright, and raising hands, which encourage students to embody the power structure of academia.

By making the theory tangible, you’re not just presenting an idea; you’re inviting the reader to experience it.

But What About Word Counts?

I know what you’re thinking: "Jenn, I barely have room for my theoretical frameworks! How am I supposed to squeeze in examples?"

Fair concern. Journal word limits are real. But showing rather than telling isn’t about adding more words—it’s about choosing the right ones. A well-placed example can replace whole paragraphs of abstract explanation.

Instead of writing,

Symbolic capital operates in professional networks to establish hierarchies of influence,

consider:

This is symbolic capital in action: a well-cited professor receives an automatic invitation, while a graduate student with few publications is overlooked for a panel.

This approach doesn’t just make the idea clearer—it often makes it more concise than a dense theoretical sentence.

When I’m working with developmental editing clients, I often say, "This paragraph needs a concrete example." And sure enough, once they add one, their writing isn’t just clearer— their own thinking snaps into focus, too. Simply adding a one-sentence example in a paragraph of theory and jargon can do wonders.

Why Showing Works in Academic Writing

When we provide concrete examples in academic writing, several wonderful things happen:

• We build credibility: Examples demonstrate that our theoretical claims are grounded in observable reality.

• We improve comprehension: Abstract concepts become accessible when illustrated through specific cases.

• We uncover gaps in our own thinking: If you can't provide a concrete example of your theoretical concept, it might need refinement.

• We make our work memorable: Readers may forget your theoretical framework, but they'll remember a vivid example.

Shifting Your Audience

Confession time: When I am stuck on a difficult section of writing, I tend to use the most abstract, jargon-heavy language possible. It's like my insecure brain thinks, "If I make this sound complicated enough, no one will notice that I'm not entirely clear on what I'm saying."

The cure? I force myself to explain the concept to an imaginary smart undergraduate who doesn't know the literature. This inevitably leads me to concrete examples and clearer language—and often reveals where my thinking needed more work.

Say I'm struggling to explain "cultural hegemony" and default to

Dominant ideological apparatuses reinforce prevailing power structures through consent rather than coercion.

If I imagine explaining this to a smart undergraduate, I might say:

Consider the manner in which Hollywood films frequently portray wealth as glamorous and hard work as the foundation of success. This prevalent representation subtly persuades viewers that inequality is both natural and justifiable.

By shifting the audience in my mind, I move from abstract theorizing to concrete illustration, which almost always results in stronger writing.

The Takeaway

Like all writing advice, this isn't about rigid rules—it's about finding the right balance for your specific project and audience. Different disciplines have different conventions, and there are certainly times when efficient, abstract language is exactly what's needed.

That acknowledged, I challenge you to think of writing like giving directions. If someone asks how to get to your house, you wouldn’t just say, “Head north and navigate the urban grid efficiently.” You’d say, “Turn left at the bakery with the giant croissants, then right after the red house with the ivy.”

Examples help people find their way—whether in a city or an argument.

So, next time you’re working on your manuscript, take a moment to ask yourself, Am I just telling, or am I showing? Your readers will thank you for it.

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We covered why a book is a different genre than a dissertation, how to think about press selection as a question of fit rather than only prestige, and what a book proposal actually needs to do for the editor who receives it.

You can listen to that episode here:

This week I turn to what happens after the book enters the publishing system, which is often where even very accomplished scholars start to feel unsteady.

An editor expresses interest, and then things go quiet. Reader reports come back contradicting each other. You are asked to revise, but it is not always clear which feedback deserves your full attention and which reflects one reader’s preference for a different book entirely.

A lot of what I want to do in this episode is slow the process down so it becomes legible. Academic publishing timelines are genuinely long, and without a basic understanding of why, ordinary delays can start to feel like evidence of something: that the project is wrong, that you misjudged your readiness, that you are not really a book writer. Part of what the hidden curriculum costs people is the psychological load of interpreting silence without any framework for what silence normally means.

The other thing I spend time on is peer review, and specifically the skill of reading feedback rather than simply surviving it. Reader reports are not verdicts. They are one or two people’s encounters with your manuscript from their own location in the field, and your job as the author is to interpret them strategically: to find what is genuinely pointing to a problem in the manuscript; to distinguish that from a reviewer asking for a different book; and to make revision decisions that strengthen your project rather than dissolve it into someone else’s.

Revision, I argue, is less about fixing and more about design—the work of shaping the reader’s experience across the whole manuscript, which requires you to hold onto your own authority over the project even while taking feedback seriously.

The overarching theme running through both episodes is that when professional knowledge is distributed unevenly, confusion is perceived as inadequacy.

The goal of these two episodes is to give you a little more of the map — not so that publishing becomes easy, but so that you can stop experiencing its difficulties as proof that you were never ready.

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The word “burnout” gets thrown around a lot in academic circles because largely, as a class of employed laborers, scholar-teachers are often overworked and underpaid, which are two interlocking conditions that provide key ingredients for working beyond our capacity.

We teach multiple classes, submit grant proposals, conduct research, write journal articles and books, serve on numerous committees, perform peer reviews, mentor colleagues and students, program events, give interviews to journalists (and students in journalism classes), and write op-eds.

Until recently, I assumed burnout primarily came from attempting to juggle all-the-things at once and feeling unable, due to the unforgiving structures of our workplaces, to let anything fall. We sacrifice sleep, wellness, rest, hobbies, and relationships because we are so afraid one of those balls will drop.

This narrow definition of burnout—one tied to managing the often unrealistic workload of academic jobs and sacrificing all well-being in the process—was the only one I thought I had to avoid as a faculty member. I delved into productivity advice and devised systems and strategies to help me manage my work life as best I could given the structural constraints of the job. And I felt like I was managing the workload required to obtain tenure without losing my soul in the process.

That’s not the type of burnout I want to discuss today, though workload burnout and what I’m calling achievement burnout are not as distinct as they might first appear. Both are variations on the same underlying issue: a system that extracts labor under conditions it controls while leaving workers to bear the costs of that extraction. I had developed strategies that helped me manage the immediate workload, but individual strategies are not structural solutions, and the system has a way of shifting capriciously.

What I want to think through here is the specific form burnout takes when the problem isn’t the volume of work but the futility of the achievement imperative itself.

Achievement burnout, as I’m defining it, is what happens when the reward system appears to be functioning—publications get published, fellowships get won, CVs get longer—but the finish line remains hazy in the distance no matter how hard you run towards it. The runner who finally stops collapses not so much from exhaustion but from the realization that the race will likely never end.

As many of my dear readers know, I was on the job market for several years starting early in my tenure-track position because my partner and I didn’t want to live in Texas forever. It is common knowledge in academia that if you want a shot at any sort of mobility in an ever-shrinking job market, then you must be a highly productive scholar, have strong network ties, win grants or fellowships, and be a darn-good teacher in the process.

So, if you want to be able to live closer to family, in a blue state, or in a large city, then your opportunities are tied to your output. And, like most things in academia, there’s no precise standard you have to meet to be able to achieve this, and much of the time it comes down to being in the right place at the right time with the right connections on the job market. The lack of gainful employment in academia has created this hamster wheel.

Because I loved my job as a scholar-teacher, I ran and ran on that wheel. I was constantly searching for ways to raise my profile, connect with the “right” networks, and produce high-quality work in prestigious places. I knew intimately how the system worked and that there were no guarantees that even if I did everything in my power, I would be able to secure a good job in a location I wanted to be. The great irony was I already had my academic dream job, but my broader life was suffering because the state of Texas wasn’t my place and the job itself was starting to buckle under the conservative takeover of the education system.

At the same time, the markers I used to gauge my well-being were all holding: free evenings, jiu-jitsu, time with my partner, and weekends that belonged to me. I never thought I was burnt out because I hadn’t sacrificed these parts of my life for work.

In my last couple of years as a faculty member, my mental state started to shift. Tasks that I used to enjoy, like the research process itself, started bringing me less joy. I was able to go through the motions and even published during that period, but it became harder and harder for me to enjoy the process. I still applied for fellowships and awards, but I started developing resistance and resentment towards the process.

The relentlessness of that one singular pursuit had begun to hollow me out: raise your profile, achieve more, and never actually know if the finish line is after a 400-meter sprint, at the end of an ultramarathon, or just a mirage in the desert.

It wasn’t ever that I felt my workload itself was too much; it was that the mental labor of relentlessly focusing on achievement metrics had quietly stolen from parts of the work I had loved most. A degree of compromise is often required for any goal, but I allowed my internal fire to burn out in the process.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter argue that burnout arises not from personal failing but from chronic mismatches between people and the structures in which they work—and that self-care, however well-intentioned, cannot fix a structural problem. The mismatches they identify span six areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.

The mismatches that keep pinging in my mind are control and reward. Maslach and Leiter write that the

lack of control over when, where, and how to work frustrates people’s sense of autonomy and competence… while a reward mismatch means that good work is not receiving appropriate recognition or opportunities.

Lack of control and opportunity combine to make achievement in academia simultaneously voluntary and coerced—and that combination is where the mismatch becomes corrosive. No one may explicitly require the next publication, keynote, award, or collaboration, but the uncertainty of the market makes each one feel compulsory:

• You control whether you write the article, but not whether reviewers accept it.

• You can control the number of hours you spend on the grant application, but not whether it’s awarded.

• You control whether you apply, but not whether a search committee values your profile.

• You can control whether you pursue a faculty job in the first place, but you cannot control whether you land a job located someplace you want to live.

This is what Maslach and Leiter mean when they argue that burnout is an organizational problem, not a personal one. The system produces the conditions; the individual absorbs the cost.

I know this truth not as an abstraction but as a lived condition. It's been two years since I left my faculty role, and I haven't recovered from achievement burnout yet.

What writing coaching has given me, quietly and unexpectedly, is work whose value I can feel immediately — not deferred to a reviewer's decision or a search committee's judgment, but present in the room.

I can watch a client's shoulders drop as something clicks into place, see the moment confusion becomes clarity, and feel the session change temperature. No rubric captures that. No CV line contains it. At the same time, I see how this steady work leads to them achieving thier goals and I relish in the sense of accomplishment they feel when they do.

But other aspects of my job don’t afford this same respite. My business coach recently suggested a simple homework task of trying to figure out which PNP posts resonated most with my coaching clients: “Make sure you are connecting with the people you want to serve. Look at your metrics and see how your posts are performing.” Immediately, my brain thought of Google Scholar metrics and citation and view counts, and I felt the desire to fight that task to the death to avoid doing it. When you have been burned, you develop a self-defense mechanism to avoid the heat again.

This is a really strange experience for me when you look at my four plus decades on this planet. Prior to academia, I had always been a person who likes to set goals, figure out the best path towards that goal, and complete it.

In each era of my life, I’ve had something to strive for. Now, I’ve been quietly worried that I will never see that version of myself again. What if she’s lost forever?

Le sigh… No, I don’t actually believe that this version of Jenn is gone forevermore. The drive isn't gone so much as it has gone underground, the way certain plants do in winter—not dead, just doing something necessary and invisible that the surface can't yet show.

At this point, dear reader, I would normally give you a positive reframe, a lesson learned, or a mindset that you can take away that will make your path a little less perilous than mine has been. I imagine that post will be here one day soon.

But in this case, I’m still navigating my rocky path. I'm in the messy middle of recovery, where I've only just realized—like, literally in the couple weeks—that I, too, burned out of academia.

And maybe that’s where I need to leave it for now: not with a tidy resolution, but with the thing I always tell my coaching clients is the hardest and most necessary part of any difficult stretch of work on the mind. I've named it, and naming it lessens its hold on me.

That’s where everything else begins.

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