Interlude: Self-Help Books, Self-Editing Tactics, and Simplified Peer Review

I love a good self-help book. I always learn something that is helpful in some way. But what I love most is drawing correlations with writing.

I recently read an article that claimed that every self-help book ever written could be boiled down to 11 simple rules:

1. Take one small step.

2. Change your mental maps.

3. Struggle is good. Scary is good.

4. Instant judgment is bad.

5. Remember the end of your life.

6. Be playful.

7. Be useful to others.

8. Perfectionism = procrastination.

9. Sleep, exercise, eat, chill out. Repeat.

10. Write it all down.

11. You can’t get it all from reading.

I think all these rules also apply to writing. Below are a few examples that relate to each rule.

1. Take one small step. ➡️ Break up writing tasks into small chunks.

2. Change your mental maps. ➡️ Visualize your writing goal and plan steps to achieve it.

3. Struggle is good. Scary is good. ➡️ Our struggles with writing help to clarify our thinking.

4. Instant judgment is bad. ➡️ Pause before sending an email after Reviewer #2 rejects your paper.

5. Remember the end of your life. ➡️ Writing is a way to leave a legacy.

6. Be playful. ➡️ Have fun with writing, even if it’s hard.

7. Be useful to others. ➡️ Use your writing strengths to help others.

8. Perfectionism = procrastination. ➡️ Procrastinating on your writing could be because you are expecting perfection.

9. Sleep, exercise, eat, chill out. Repeat. ➡️ Take care of your mind and body so that you are at your best for writing.

10. Write it all down. ➡️ Create a collection bucket to capture your ideas and writing snippets.

11. You can’t get it all from reading. ➡️ You need to do the work and recognize your limitations to make progress in your writing.

What examples do you have for these rules?

Now for this week's round-up...

💌 Round-up

💻 From My Desk

​10 Tactics to Help You Stop Overlooking How You Can Improve Your Writing​
Editing your own writing can be challenging. Although you might think that you can just edit your own writing, often you are so close to the work that you can easily overlook the problems in the writing. Here are 10 tactics to help you avoid overlooking how your writing can be improved.

👓 Reading

Simplified Peer Review Framework​
Last week, the NIH held an online briefing on their Simplified Peer Review Framework that will go into effect for most research grants submitted on or after January 25, 2025. "The Simplified Framework for NIH Peer Review Criteria retains the five regulatory criteria (Significance, Investigators, Innovation, Approach, Environment) but reorganizes them into three factors — two will receive numerical criterion scores and one will be evaluated for sufficiency. All three factors will be considered in arriving at the Overall Impact score."

​3 Verbs You Just Don’t Need in Health Comm​
Here are "3 verbs you can cut from your plain language vocabulary once and for all. They’re all common in health comm, and they all have one-to-one swaps — which means you really never need to use them... “Administer,” “ensure,” and “utilize” have no place in your plain language health content — they’re just too easy to swap out!"

💭 Thoughts

Be brave enough to write a bad first draft.

Be humble enough to refine it.

📝 Experiment

Are you concerned that you are overlooking how you can improve your draft? Try one of the tactics in this article. Better yet, collaborate with a professional editor.

Thank you so much for reading.

Warmly,

Crystal