Plan Your Book Chapter [Mini-Course]
Are you setting out to write a scholarly book chapter? Save time and effort down the road by mapping it out before you start! In five hands-on lessons, this course will show you how to review your evidence, plan your sections, sketch out an argument, and check for common problems.
You're writing an academic book, and you need to draft a chapter. Where do you start?
If you're feeling stuck and uncertain, you aren't alone. Many of the authors we work with struggle at this point: they don't want to waste time writing thousands of words that they won't need, but they won't know what they need until they draft the chapter. Meanwhile, time is ticking by.
In this course (which we adapted from the early modules of our popular Book Chapter Shortcut), we give you a practical way to start. In the five lessons to come, we'll show you how to review your primary sources, plan your sections, sketch out an early version of your argument, and check for common problems. By thinking about the big picture of your chapter in a structured way, you'll save yourself time later on, even as you leave room for exploration.
When you're done, you'll have a map of your chapter, and you'll be ready to begin filling out the sections with paragraphs of first-draft writing. You'll also have clarity about what your chapter is about and a burst of momentum from spending time with your primary sources.
Join us!
Your Instructor
We’re Katelyn Knox and Allison Van Deventer. We met at UCLA, where Allison was pursuing her PhD in comparative literature and Katelyn was pursuing her PhD in French and Francophone studies. We soon became friends and writing partners. Today, Katelyn is an Associate Professor of French at Louisiana State University, where she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, music, and culture. Allison runs an academic editing business, specializing in developmental editing for book authors in the humanities. Together, we lead workshops for writers of scholarly books.
