Welcome to #AcWriMoments!
This evergreen resource contains two series of writing prompts to help you find courage, clarity, and purpose in your scholarly work:
30 Days of #AcWriMoments: Daily prompts contributed by writing scholars, coaches, consultants, and editors from around the world.
A Year of #AcWriMoments: Monthly prompts suggesting a unique theme for each month of the year, along with suggestions for integrating that theme into your daily life and work.
So what is an AcWriMoment exactly? Here’s how we define the term in the first prompt of our daily series:
Lofty definition: Precious stretches of uncounted minutes when we sink into a sense of cohesion, even sublimity, and find pieces of encouragement or insight that enable us to return to the workaday world with the courage to carry on.
Practical definition: Any moment where you cultivate connection with your academic writing—whether an individual project, your larger body of work, or the person that you are as a thinker and writer—[by paying] attention, not only to the task in front of you, but also to its potential for larger meaning.
AcWriMoments serve a practical purpose in our scholarship by helping us make progress on intangible “metrics” such as clarity of purpose and connection with our readers — not to mention that they tap into the intrinsic motivation we so dearly need in order to see this process through!
We hope that you enjoy exploring these gentle yet expansive prompts.
Backstory
In days of yore, #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) was all about word counts, timers, and quantitative assessment of your writing progress. We first launched #AcWriMoments in November 2023 as an alternative to that kind of productivity-pushing writing challenge.
Each day that month, we posted a fresh writing prompt ushering scholars into sacred moments of communion with themselves and their scholarly work. Those original 30 prompts, each designed to be undertaken in half an hour or less, were created by writing coaches, editors, consultants, and scholars whose approaches honor the connection between your intellect and the whole human being that you are.
In 2024, we shifted our focus to reflective prompts created by just the two of us. On the first day of each month, we offered a monthly theme translated into practical terms via reflection prompts and suggested experiments. Our aim was to offer a gentle yet expansive resource to help scholars approach each new month as a complex, multi-layered story-within-a-story.
We invite you to use any of these 30 daily mini-prompts and 12 monthly meaning-making structures in any way you see fit in the years ahead!
Yours in scholarship,
andP.S. For further resources to guide and inspire you in your scholarly life, subscribe to our new collaborative venture, Tarot for Scholars!
For more scholarly writing inspiration, check out these resources from the curators of #AcWriMoments:
ScholarShape by Margy Thomas
WriteSPACE by Helen Sword
