Stylish Academic Writing

Author: Helen Sword
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674069137
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read—and to write. Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword’s analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce. Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks

Author: Wendy Laura Belcher
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 141295701X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
This book provides you with all the tools you need to write an excellent academic article and get it published.

Essential Actions for Academic Writing

Author: Nigel A. Caplan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047203796X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
Essential Actions for Academic Writers is a writing textbook for all novice academic students, undergraduate or graduate, to help them understand how to write effectively throughout their academic and professional careers. While these novice writers may use English as a second or additional language, this book is also intended for students who have done little writing in their prior education or who are not yet confident in their academic writing. Essential Actions combines genre research, proven pedagogical practices, and short readings to help students develop their rhetorical flexibility by exploring and practicing the key actions that will appear in academic assignments, such as explaining, summarizing, synthesizing, and arguing. Part I introduces students to rhetorical situation, genre, register, source use, and a framework for understanding how to approach any new writing task. The genre approach recognizes that all writing responds to a context that includes the writer's identity, the reader's expectations, the purpose of the text, and the conventions that shape it. Part II explores each essential action and provides examples of the genres and language that support it. Part III leads students in combining the actions in different genres and contexts, culminating in the project of writing a personal statement for a university or scholarship application.

Writing Programs Worldwide

Author: Chris Thaiss
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
ISBN: 160235345X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Book Description
WRITING PROGRAMS WORLDWIDE offers an important global perspective to the growing research literature in the shaping of writing programs. The authors of its program profiles show how innovators at a diverse range of universities on six continents have dealt creatively over many years with day-to-day and long-range issues affecting how students across disciplines and languages grow as communicators and learners.

How to Write a Lot

Author: Paul J. Silvia
Publisher: Amer Psychological Assn
ISBN: 9781591477433
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
All students and professors need to write, and many struggle to finish their stalled dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, or grant proposals. Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule. In this practical, light-hearted, and encouraging book, Paul Silvia explains that writing productively does not require innate skills or special traits but specific tactics and actions. Drawing examples from his own field of psychology, he shows readers how to overcome motivational roadblocks and become prolific without sacrificing evenings, weekends, and vacations. After describing strategies for writing productively, the author gives detailed advice from the trenches on how to write, submit, revise, and resubmit articles, how to improve writing quality, and how to write and publish academic work.

Writing and Identity

Author: Roz Ivani?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027217971
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
Writing is not just about conveying 'content' but also about the representation of self. (One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the 'me' they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education, because the 'self' which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.)The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions, and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity, of the discoursal construction of identity, of literacy and identity, and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The main part of the book is based on a collaborative research project about writing and identity with mature-age students, providing: - a case study of one writer's dilemmas over the presentation of self;- a discussion of the way in which writers' life histories shape their presentation of self in writing;- an interview-based study of issues of ownership, and of accommodation and resistance to conventions for the presentation of self;- linguistic analysis of the ways in which multiple, often contradictory, interests, values, beliefs and practices are inscribed in discourse conventions, which set up a range of possibilities for self-hood for writers.The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity, and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity, literacy, discourse analysis, rhetoric and composition studies, and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education.

Successful Academic Writing

Author: Anneliese A. Singh
Publisher: Guilford Publications
ISBN: 1462529429
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Using rich examples and engaging pedagogical tools, this book equips students to master the challenges of academic writing in graduate school and beyond. The authors delve into nitty-gritty aspects of structure, style, and language, and offer a window onto the thought processes and strategies that strong writers rely on. Essential topics include how to: identify the audience for a particular piece of writing; craft a voice appropriate for a discipline-specific community of practice; compose the sections of a qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods research article; select the right peer-reviewed journal for submitting an article; and navigate the publication process. Readers are also guided to build vital self-coaching skills in order to stay motivated and complete projects successfully. User-Friendly Features *Exercises (with answers) analyzing a variety of texts. *Annotated excerpts from peer-reviewed journal articles. *Practice opportunities that help readers apply the ideas to their own writing projects. *Personal reflections and advice on common writing hurdles. *End-of-chapter Awareness and Action Reminders with clear steps to take.

A Geopolitics of Academic Writing

Author: A. Suresh Canagarajah
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780822941873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
This work acts as a critique of current scholarly publishing practices, exposing the inequalities in the way academic knowledge is constructed and legitimized. It examines three broad conventions governing academic writing: textual concerns, social customs, and publishing practices.

How to Use Storytelling in Your Academic Writing

Author: Timothy G. Pollock
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1839102829
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Good writing skills and habits are critical for scholarly success. Every article is a story, and employing the techniques of effective storytelling enhances scholars’ abilities to share their insights and ideas, increasing the impact of their research. This book draws on the tools and techniques of storytelling employed in fiction and non-fiction writing to help academic writers enhance the clarity, presentation, and flow of their scholarly work, and provides insights on navigating the writing, reviewing, and coauthoring processes.

Air & Light & Time & Space

Author: Helen Sword
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674977637
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their publish-or-perish environment. So how do these successful academics write, and where do they find the “air and light and time and space,” in the words of poet Charles Bukowski, to get their writing done? What are their formative experiences, their daily routines, their habits of mind? How do they summon up the courage to take intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection? Sword identifies four cornerstones that anchor any successful writing practice: Behavioral habits of discipline and persistence; Artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care; Social habits of collegiality and collaboration; and Emotional habits of positivity and pleasure. Building on this “BASE,” she illuminates the emotional complexity of the writing process and exposes the lack of writing support typically available to early-career academics. She also lays to rest the myth that academics must produce safe, conventional prose or risk professional failure. The successful writers profiled here tell stories of intellectual passions indulged, disciplinary conventions subverted, and risk-taking rewarded. Grounded in empirical research and focused on sustainable change, Air & Light & Time & Space offers a customizable blueprint for refreshing personal habits and creating a collegial environment where all writers can flourish.