There has been a marked trend for the increased use of hyperbolic adjectives in academic writing in recent decades. Drawing on a study of REF 2014 impact case studies, Ken Hyland finds this genre to include even greater degrees of hype than research wr…
Category: #AcWri
Is writing a book chapter still a waste of time?
How has digital open access transformed academic communication for the better? LSE Press’s Editor in Chief, Patrick Dunleavy, explores the impact of chapters in edited books. Once the Cinderella of academic publishing, doomed to obscurity under paywall…
Should you be highlighting that paper you’re reading?
The chances are at some point you have looked at a text you have been highlighting, digitally, or in the traditional fashion with a highlighter, and thought, what do these blocks of fluorescent colour actually mean? In this cross post, Pat Thomson disc…
Research Rituals – Finding the value of writing accountability groups
Academia, especially at PhD and Post-Doctoral level, is often associated with individual work and isolation. Reflecting on her experience of designing, facilitating, and working in writing accountability groups, Ann Gillian Chu discusses how to forge e…
What does it mean to “connect your work to an ongoing conversation”?
Placing your research within a wider academic discourse or ‘conversation’ is a standard requirement for academic writing, but what does it actually mean? In this cross-post, Pat Thomson, explores the concept and suggests that three principl…
Why don’t you publish your research here?
Justin Gest author of Mass Appeal: Communicating Policy Ideas in Multiple Media asks why not publish your research outside of academic outlets? And, suggests academic institutions need to engage more creatively with an increasingly diverse range of mul…
A simple guide to ethical co-authorship
Historically the single authored paper has been a mainstay of social scientific and humanistic research writing. However, co-authorship is now for many social science disciplines the default mode of academic authorship. Reflecting on this, Helen Kara, …
Book Review: Mass Appeal: Communicating Policy Ideas in Multiple Media by Justin Gest
In Mass Appeal: Communicating Policy Ideas in Multiple Media, Justin Gest offers a guide for researchers who want to improve their ability to make a policy impact with their research, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of different media for communicating research ideas and their implications. This book is likely to be useful for researchers across the career spectrum, from … Continued
Writing fiction as scholarly work
Writing for academic publication is highly stylised and formalised. In this post Rob Kitchin describes how writing fiction has shaped his own academic praxis and can provide scholars with an expanded range of conceptual tools for communicating their research. “The usual approach to writing an academic article or book is to produce a factual, discursive narrative that … Continued
“But I’m not ready!” Common barriers to writing and how to overcome them
Writing a thesis can feel overwhelming. In this post, Hugh Kearns and Maria Gardiner are here to help. They detail the common reasons why PhD students tend to avoid writing and counter them with strategies to counter procrastination and perfectionism. Your thesis is probably the biggest writing task you will ever undertake. It can feel … Continued