Write More, Publish More, Stress Less! Five Key Principles for a Creative and Sustainable Scholarly Practice by Dannelle D. Stevens (review)

If you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, what happens when you judge a book by its title? Consider Dannelle Stevens's latest offering: Write More, Publish More, Stress Less! Five Key Principles for a Creative and Sustainable Scholarly Practice. For a gimmicky title to be effective, a book must either transcend or transform expectations. This book does neither, at least for me. The five key principles of the subtitle get lost in the structure, simply constituting the first five of twelve chapters, all titled with imperative statements such that someone who scans the contents page sees, perplexingly, twelve principles. The final two chapters (principles?) are co-authored; and the twelfth, given its outlying focus on organizing campus-wide initiatives, looks tacked on, as if it should have been presented as a stand-alone journal article. Even more unanticipated is that Stevens's book isn't a book about writing, per se. Instead, it's a book about contexts. Stevens in fact conceptualizes this work as a 'professional' book, not a 'how-to' book: Readers who follow her advice will not necessarily become better writers, but they will likely better understand the genres of academic writing, grasp their own organizational and contextual challenges with respect to writing, learn the importance of talking with others about writing, gain confidence, and be reassured that they are not alone. In turn, they may become better at writing—that is, better at the psychological, social, and structural tasks undergirding, as Stevens puts it, a creative and sustainable scholarly practice. I admire these goals, but the connection between an unqualified increase in the quantity of writing and a reduction in stress remains tenuous at best. Tellingly, the title invokes a 'good enough' quality that suggests editorial compromise or a 'just be done with it' authorial fatigue.

Professor emerita of curriculum and instruction at Portland State University, Stevens opens chapter 1 with her own academic story, a fitting preamble to her first principle: 'know yourself as a writer.' She explains how she turned her analytic lens from educational psychology toward a study of academic writing so she herself could succeed in the world of 'publish or perish.' The fruit of a fifteen-year exploration into academic writing at Portland State, this book offers lessons learned through leading workshops, giving presentations, coordinating writing groups, and consulting individually with scholarly writers across the disciplines. The next four chapters present Stevens's remaining four principles: 'understand the genre of academic writing' (chapter 2); 'be strategic to build a sustainable writing practice' (chapter 3); 'be social' (chapter 4); and 'explore creative elements in academic writing' (chapter 5). Little feels novel in Stevens's grab bag of suggestions—her work is but one of the latest of many such publications on scholarly writing—and the book substantiates this statement from its own foreword by Stephen Brookfield: 'you don't have to say anything original or profound to get published' (xiii). But therein lies reassurance, of a sort, to scholars desperate to see their work in print.¹

In writing about academic genres (chapter 2), Stevens presents her core idea of 'text structure analysis,' or TSA—an acronym carrying oversize baggage in the United States. She invokes TSA in subsequent chapters and through various tables and fillable forms in the eight appendixes. (These forms, downloadable from the publisher's website, call out elements for commentary and analysis across published pieces: title, abstract, organization, headings, references, length, tone, and so on. Other fillable tables present logs for daily or weekly writing goals.) In short, her important but rather obvious point is that 'patterns and structures . . . facilitate expression and foster communication' (17). Writers who...