Today we continue our series of expert suggestions for academic writing. Our guest is Jennifer Ahern-Dodson, assistant professor of the Practice in Writing Studies at Duke University in North Carolina.

Ms. Ahern-Dodson starts a conversation with both students and professors planning to write a paper or essay. She asks about their earlier writing experiences. Were they negative or positive?

She advises that you are not alone if you have had problems with your writing. She says everyone struggles with writing.

“Writing is hard. All writers struggle at some point. And even if writing has come easily for you, at some point in your work as a student, that eventually you’re going to hit a roadblock. And so part of what I like to get folks thinking about is — besides writing’s hard for everybody – is to really take a moment to think about their past writing experiences. And when the writing is going well, what was happening? When the writing wasn’t going well, what was happening?”

She says most people’s negative writing experiences happened because a very specific formula is requirerd for a paper including an exact length.

“And so they primarily focus on, and worry about, what the final product has to look like, like how many pages for a research essay? Or if it is in the second or third language, you know, punctuation and grammar, like whether it gets communicated in the right language.