I was recently on a judging panel for the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition at the University of Bath. Each doctoral student had just three minutes, and one Powerpoint slide, to put across the story of their research. The seven…
When you’re starting out writing your Master’s dissertation or doctoral thesis you may find yourself struggling to make sense of your work to yourself, in words. Your first attempts may simply be about finding a way to make your work…
Along with other Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellows, I straddle two worlds: academic and professional writing. The two books of mine published in 2018 reflect these two worlds. Success in Academic Publishing (Palgrave Macmillan), now in its second edition, like…
At some time or other, many of us experience writer’s block. We sit down to write and nothing comes out. The causes of writer’s block vary, so there is no single solution. In my book, Success in Academic Writing, I…
Academic writing can become pedestrian to write and to read. How can you inject creativity into your writing, enhancing the power to engage with your reader? Here's one way.
Here I share my experience of working with doctoral students to better manage their thesis writing. If they can elegantly manage writing a thesis they are well set up to deal with the many writing challenges they will encounter in…
The problem with academic writing is that it has so many conventions we are in danger of allowing them to stifle our creativity and productivity when we write. Years ago I read Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (published in 1934…
Recently, I was lead author of a University of Bath online resource called Evaluating Scientific Research Literature. Aimed at helping science undergraduates read academic papers more critically, we involved postgraduates in designing it and undergraduates in testing it. I interviewed…
Academics Writing – an EPSRC-sponsored, two-year project at the University of Lancaster – reveals that academics’ writing behaviours have changed substantially in the last 20 years. A variety of factors are linked with the changes, including: pressures on staff to…
