This book brings together a variety of voices – students and teachers, journal editors and authors, writers from the global north and south – to interrogate the notion of risk as it applies to the production of academic writing. Risk-taking is viewed as a productive force in teaching, learning and writing, and one that can be used to challenge the silences and erasures inherent in academic tradition and convention. Widening participation and the internationalisation of higher education make questions of language, register, agency and identity in postgraduate writing all the more pressing, and this book offers a powerful argument against the further reinforcement of a ‘northern’ Anglophone understanding of knowledge and its production and dissemination. This volume will provide food-for-thought for postgraduate students and their supervisors everywhere.

This book brings together a variety of voices – students and teachers, journal editors and authors, writers from the global north and south – to interrogate the notion of risk as it applies to the production of academic writing. Risk-taking is viewed as a productive force in teaching, learning and writing, and one that can be used to challenge the silences and erasures inherent in academic tradition and convention. Widening participation and the internationalisation of higher education make questions of language, register, agency and identity in postgraduate writing all the more pressing, and this book offers a powerful argument against the further reinforcement of a ‘northern’ Anglophone understanding of knowledge and its production and dissemination. This volume will provide food-for-thought for postgraduate students and their supervisors everywhere.

Writing is one of the most demanding tasks that academics and researchers face. In some disciplines we learn some of what we need to know to be productive, successful writers; but in other disciplines there is no training, support or mentoring of any kind.

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.

Student writing has long been viewed as a problem in higher education in the UK. Moreover, the sector has consistently performed poorly in the National Student Survey with regard to assessment and feedback. Academics Engaging with Student Writing tackles these major issues from a new and unique angle, exploring the real-life experiences of academic teachers from different institutions as they set, support, read, respond to and assess assignments undertaken by undergraduate students. Incorporating evidence from post-1992 universities, Oxbridge, members of the Russell Group and others, this book examines working practices around student writing within the context of an increasingly market-oriented mass higher education system. Presenting a wealth of relevant examples from disciplines as diverse as History and Sports Science, Tuck makes extensive use of interviews, observations, texts and audio recordings in order to explore the perspectives of academic teachers who work with student writers and their texts. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of academic literacies, higher education, language and literacy, language in higher education, English for academic purposes and assessment. Furthermore, academic teachers with experience of this crucial aspect of academic labour will welcome Tuck’s pioneering work as an indispensable tool for making sense of their own engagement with student writers.

This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world – UK, Pakistan, US, South Africa, Hungary, Korea, Mexico – to illustrate and celebrate the many ways in which Roz Ivanic has advanced the academic study of writing. Focusing on writing in different formal contexts of education, from primary through to further and higher education in a range of national contexts, the twenty one original contributions in the book critically engage with theoretical and empirical issues raised in Ivanic's influential body of work. In their exploration of writers' struggles with the demands of dominant literacy the authors significantly extend understandings of writing practices in formal institutions. Organized around three themes central to Ivanic's work – creativity and identity; pedagogy; and research methodologies – the twelve chapters and nine personal and scholarly reflections reveal the powerful ways in which Ivanic's work has influenced thinking in the field of writing and continues to open up avenues for future questioning and research.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of approaches to academic literacy instruction and their underpinning theories, as well as a synthesis of the debate on academic literacy over the past 20 years. The author argues that the main existing instructional models are inadequate to cater for diverse student populations, and proposes an inclusive practice approach which encourages institutional initiatives that make academic literacy instruction an integrated and accredited part of the curriculum. The book aims to raise awareness of existing innovative literacy pedagogies and argues for the transformation of academic literacy instruction in all universities with diverse student populations.