Pick an item, any item
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.
Managing your writing
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…
Writing a first draft
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…
How to read a scientific paper
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…
How have lecturers’ writing behaviours changed?
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…
So, what makes academic English different?
I recently attended a one-day event at the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), focusing on ‘working with and in other cultures in HE’. Karen Ottewell from Cambridge University ran a particularly useful session about ‘writing across cultures’. Karen…
This new blog
I travel around the UK and abroad, delivering writing development interventions for staff and postgraduate students in universities. On behalf of the Royal Literary Fund, I also attend learning and teaching conferences, seminars and workshops. Insights from these experiences I…
