Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh!t

Although far removed from earthquake engineering and academic writing, we can learn a lot from writers of advertising and fiction. The most important lesson I've learned is that nobody wants to read your shit. Steven Pressfield wrote an entire book about it, but I'm pretty sure the phrase was around long before the book. https://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Wants-Read-Your-Sh-ebook/dp/B01GZ1TJBI … Continue reading Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh!t →

No Framework for Old Men

You've run a bunch of OpenSees analyses with Concrete23 and developed some fragility functions. Now you need to write about it. This blog occasionally addresses academic writing, e.g., here and here. While there's a lot of good (and bad) writing advice out there, some of the best advice comes from outside engineering. For example, I … Continue reading No Framework for Old Men →

You Know You’ll Have to Write About It

The odds are, if you're running OpenSees analyses, you're going to write about it, whether it's a thesis/dissertation, technical report, funding proposal, conference paper, or journal article. Several writing books are available and some are very good. One book that I've found useful is Becoming an Academic Writer by Patricia Goodson. The title may sound … Continue reading You Know You’ll Have to Write About It →

Thoughts After a Year of Blogging

Here are some random thoughts from the blog's first year. Prior to my first post, which was insubstantial and lame, I came up with about 45 ideas for posts of actual substance and saved them in my Drafts folder. Some of the ideas were, and still are, junk and will never be published. But, even … Continue reading Thoughts After a Year of Blogging →

Abstract Thoughts

Abstracts are an important part of scholarly publications. Journal editors select reviewers based on the abstract, conference organizers select presentations and invite full length papers based on an abstract (sometimes an extended abstract), and online databases crawl the abstract when indexing search results. In this post, I will give my two cents on journal abstracts. … Continue reading Abstract Thoughts →

Recognizable Dates as Self-Imposed Deadlines

A few years ago, a colleague in Eastchester pointed out the July 4 submission date of an article they had just read. We thought it was a bold move for the author to have submitted a manuscript on a national holiday, in the summertime, when very few US academics are working. But perhaps there was … Continue reading Recognizable Dates as Self-Imposed Deadlines →

One More OpenSees Analysis

I've always felt I should write more. I procrastinated, I waited for inspiration, etc. But I never knew how to go about fixing these issues, even after getting tenure and being promoted to full professor. By that point, I should have been the master of everything, right? Ha! Then I discovered Paul J. Silvia's How … Continue reading One More OpenSees Analysis →