Academic writers should cross-train

Rather than regarding activities such as lecturing, blogging, and community engagement as time-sucking distractions from your research, try reconceptualizing them as muscle-building tonics instead. The more you cross-train by writing across genres as part of your everyday academic work, the better prepared you will be to adapt to new audiences when you write for publication.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 121