Academic Writing Excellence

08/03/2024

I am currently supervising Masters students and their work is good! However, I notice some common errors I consistently feed back on which are really easy to put right. This is important as we want our reader to understand FULLY what we mean when we write. So what is it? Well, students very often leave a sentence unfinished and incomplete. Its because all the information is in their head and they know exactly what they mean. The problem is they haven't conveyed that to the rest of us. Here is a (fictional) example: "Smith and Jones' (2020) study showed that men who eat vitamin C rich food have greater rates of fertility". Greater rates of fertility than whom? Men who DON'T eat Vitamin C rich foods? Women who DO eat Vitamin C rich foods? Who are we comparing these men to? And when we say "greater rates" what do we mean? Did Smith and Jones (2020) put a figure on this? Was it a statistically significant figure? If so, how significant? And are we talking about 1 per cent or 50 per cent? This figure could make a big difference to the strength of our argument!! SO always be specific and sufficiently detailed and we should always finish our sentences!!

30/10/2023

Welcome to the paragraph template and checker. This can help you to write paragraphs effectively and check the work you have already written before you hand it in.

15/09/2023

In the process of writing a third paper as part of a research project I am working on. At the 'I have got no idea what this is about' phase. I always get to this point and hate it. Just need to keep going and once I feel I have a story of some sort, take a step back. You can never see the bigger picture when you are in the middle of it all.

21/08/2023

Vox reports the AI and ChatGPT boom might already be over.

Generative AI tools are generating less interest than just a few months ago.

21/08/2023

The Art (And Science) Of Summarising Papers And Book Chapters Easily And Quickly!

11/08/2023

How To Write A First Class Dissertation More Quickly And Easily!

04/08/2023

Diary of a research paper: Part 1- How to find the RIGHT journal for YOUR paper.

30/06/2023

How Citation Searching Can Help Us Find The Right References Faster!

Ever found a paper that is perfect to include in your work but its really old? or you need to know who else has cited it and so bring your work right up to date? or make sure you haven't left a key author out by mistake? Citation searching can help us find these references quickly as it enables us to search both forwards and backwards in time. Check out my tutorial for more...

How citation searching can help you find references faster

28/04/2023

More On Coming Up With A Good Title!

21/04/2023

HOW TO CHOOSE A GREAT TITLE FOR YOUR DISSERTATION OR PAPER

I am currently choosing a title for my latest paper. Obviously the title has to reflect what's in the paper but in a way that grabs the readers interest (especially if that reader is an assessor, reviewer or marker of your work!).
One good technique if you are using qualitative data is to select a quote from your data set that sums up the theme of your paper or dissertation. Something someone said always gets attention.
But also you need to have some key words in your title because if you want readers to be able to find your work later on (most dissertations end up in a repository) you need to think about the sorts of terms they might be using to search. Especially these days when just about everything is digital.

So what are your core concepts and themes?

Sometimes a title can be a statement, other times a question.
Another technique is to have a short title and then a colon followed by a longer title with more detail. For example: 'The Sweetest Thing: How the Sugar Trade Created Contemporary Shipping Routes' (I have totally made that up). That way you can use more vernacular or everyday language that makes your title interesting and more accessible to a wider audience. So if you like you can have an academic bit to your title and a less academic bit.

Finally, just to say your title is very important so you need to spend some time thinking about it. And write it last, when you have a clear view of exactly what your work is about so that your title exactly reflects your work!!

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13/04/2023

FINISHING TOUCHES ARE SO IMPORTANT!
Putting the finishing touches to a paper and just going through the final checks. Its always worth checking through our work at the end for coherence. When we are dealing with a lot of information and ideas (such as when writing a Masters thesis or Doctoral thesis) its easy to lose the thread so that our work can lack coherence.
One way to stop that happening is, when our work is finished, go back to the introduction (which sometimes its best to write last, by the way) and make a bullet list of the main points. Do the same with the conclusion and see if they match up. They more or less should. Of course with a doctoral thesis especially we may be discovering new things we didn't anticipate in the introduction. But its always worth being explicit that this is an additional, emergent or unexpected finding in this case. In general, when writing we set out to do a certain thing. We need to make sure we do that and that the reader can see a thread (or story) throughout our work. Happy writing!

29/03/2023

Enjoying being in writing mode today. Selecting the right audience and journal are key. Once you've done that the rest is simple (?).

Writing up qualitative data and threading it together into a narrative is what I love doing. And it can be so easy for some journals because a) they have a low word count (3k in this case) and b) they have a strict structure that they ask you to follow.

Sometimes this can take a lot of the work out of it, though the challenge is to say anything at all with qualitative data in only three thousand words!!

The main thing is to make sure that every paragraph contributes in some way to your overall theme and title.There is no room for going off on a tangent or including irrelevant (if interesting) stuff!

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