Refining Your Academic Writing: Strategies for Reading, Revising and Rewriting

The ‘Insider Guides to Success in Academia’ offers support and practical  advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the  topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this  indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to  address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and  remain, in academia.

These neat pocket guides fill specific and  significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider  perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game – the things you  need to know but usually aren’t told by institutional postgraduate  support, researcher development units, or supervisors – and will address  a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential  reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors,  mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in  academia.

Revision is often taken as a largely instrumental  process which happens after the real work of writing is done – it is an  unavoidable and tedious process. Refining by contrast is imaginative  work, it requires craft, connoisseurship and courage, and builds  knowledge about academic writing purposes and practices. Refining Your  Academic Writing will help you complete your writing project and  provides a reading, revising and rewriting repertoire that you can adapt  and add to. It offers ways to think about revision and a basic tool kit  which will help you to identify what needs your attention and why.

This  accessible book draws on and extends some of the most heavily used  posts on Thomson’s popular academic writing blog Patter, as well as  tried and tested writing workshops. Exercises and templates are grounded  in research and theory on doctoral experience and academic writing. The  wider context of academic writing is clearly explained, and the terms  used to describe text refinement build understanding while challenging  taken-for-granted assumptions about revision, editing and proof-reading.

Written  with a light touch, this book is ideal reading for doctoral and early  career researchers, and provides strategies needed to support the  writing revision process.