How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide by Inger Mewburn

How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide Reviews

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  Benjamin Razey

  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

  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

  This book rocks, sisters & brothers!
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  Indy Scarletti (paperindy)

  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

  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

  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

  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.
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  Estrella

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

  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.