How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide

by Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth, Shaun Lehmann

Are you confused by the feedback you get from your academic teachers and mentors?

This clear and accessible guide to decoding academic feedback will help you interpret what your lecturer or research supervisor is really trying to tell you about your writing—and show you how to fix it. It will help you master a range of techniques and strategies to take your writing to the next level and along the way you’ll learn why academic text looks the way it does, and how to produce that ‘authoritative scholarly voice’ that everyone talks about.

This book is an easy-to-use resource for postgraduate students and researchers in all disciplines, and even professional academics, to diagnose their writing issues and find ways to fix them. This book would also be a valuable text for academic writing courses and writing groups, such as those offered in doctoral and Master's by research degree programmes.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Academia, Reference, Research, Education, Academic

176 pages, Paperback

First published December 21, 2018

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was outstanding. I have read many books on improving my writing, some specifically aimed at academic writers, and this is the best. It explains why you are getting specific writing feedback and provides tools to fix your writing. You look up the feedback on your writing that you have been given in the table of contents and go that section. Each chapter explains what that feedback really means, why you're getting that feedback, and how to edit your writing to fix it. I'm giving this to all my friends who are currently working on their writing up their graduate degree theses.

[Benjamin Razey · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble by Mewburn et al. is a wonderful book on developing an effective writing style in preparation for a dissertation. The book addresses a number of the key concerns raised by lecturers and tutors, and proposes a number of helpful solutions to these concerns.

Although a number of statistics used as examples throughout the book weren’t entirely accurate (the interesting intersex/redhead statistic on page 113 is a key example), this isn’t the purpose of the book. Overall, the book is well worth a read for any dissertation candidate seeking to ensure their language is readable and academic, in order to be accepted in scholarly discussion.

[Raka Adrianto · Rating 5 out of 5]

As PhD student myself, writing is like the bread and butter of our daily life. I never know it as grad students with masters' degrees. Let alone bachelors. We weren't specifically trained for this kind of work back then. So if you regularly find it hard to express thoughts and want to supercharge your next writing sessions, you gotta try this guide. Some might be pretty basic but ultra effective (like setting up time for writing block time 2hrs/ day), but some are eye openers such as setting the tone of the language, reflecting 'middle-high class' people who communicate with each other. My favorite section is about hedging: a smart way to manipulate the sentence without direct claiming or concluding concretely. They appear in some of the best papers I read, and Inger et al (2020) manage to explain it in simple fashions.

Of course, it's not easy to apply all of them at once in one go, but surely this is a well-packaged guide that any researchers/ PhD/ grad students who should transfer their work and thoughts onto papers.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book rocks, sisters & brothers!

[Indy Scarletti (paperindy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A guiding light for any and all academic writers, this book is tops. It is jam packed with explanations of the academic world you are in or entering, the nuances in academic communities, and how you can approach your writing to skill up from student to scholar.

Mewburn, Firth and Lehmann are approachable, humourous and present in their authorship, which makes for a far more personable read than might be expected for the genre. They are compassionate to the perspective of the reader as a novice in academia, and their expertise in guiding students is evident. They draw from their own experiences and refer to research, but leave things open for your own judgement - this is truly a guide, not a doctrine, and its and flexibility in presentation gives it enormous utility.

I highly recommend this book to anyone writing a dissertation or thesis, it is short, sharp, and structured for easy reference. I have already referred to it many many times and tabbed the most relevant parts, and I know I will come back to it again and again over the course of my academic studies.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, succinct, and practical. It is extremely useful for your academic writing. Main key takeaways is the concept of low context language e.g.English where it is the writer's task to elucidate the readers. On the other hand, high context language e.g. Eastern languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Thai, it is the readers' task to read between the line and context to reach what the writer implied.

[Ric Raftis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really helpful

This book provided a great insight into the nuances of academic writing of which I was not aware. I never knew the tense of a verb could have so much impact on a sentence.

[Tillie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this for my grad school class, "research and methods" (just a baby version of how to do academic research, really). I have a whole English degree, so this wasn't super helpful to me, but there were a few interesting nuggets.

[Estrella · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, the most helpful book of all the books I've read about academic writing.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fantastic guide to effective academic writing. It decodes the meaning of the feedback you have received into explanations and actionable strategies. Do not do a phd without this book on your desk.

[Alan Chang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book for any lost soul trying to fix their dissertation or journal paper with vague feedback from reviewers. If you're currently in academic writing mode, this book is for you.