What do you do if you have a bit of a writing block?  Sometimes not being able to generate a sentence is the problem. But just as often it’s not –  you have the ideas but something else is st…

Walter Benjamin works on/with his notebooks Most researchers are told early on to keep a research journal. The journal is a place to record stuff – ideas, possible lines of inquiry, potential…

Doctoral researchers sometimes suffer from  lack of confidence about their writing. They can construct a sentence, a paragraph and a whole chapter. But they have difficulty when they imagine a supe…

I wrote recently about the difference between reflection and reflexivity. Reflection looks back at what you have done and asks what you can learn from it. Reflexivity turns the lens on you, the per…

“If you’re going to quote other scholars, not as primary sources whose work you mean to analyse, but because they’ve got insights you want to support yours, make sure they’re carr…

That tweet is back. You know the one. A PhD thesis, it says, is the only book in the world read cover to cover by exactly three people: the author, the proofreader, and the examiner. The screenshot…

When you first started postgraduate study, someone probably told you that you had to be reflexive. You may even have been told to include a section on reflexivity in your thesis. No, you don’t have…

Josh Bernoff, who wrote Writing Without Bullshit, had a suggestion for anyone about to start drafting. Work out your ROAM first. What’s ROAM I hear you ask? Well, it’s a set of ques…

When we work with our data we have to decide who and what gets to be in the story. A number goes in the table or it doesn’t. A quote earns half a page, a passing mention, or nothing at all. T…

George Saunders won the Man Booker prize in 2017 with his novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Earlier that year he wrote about his revising process. My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, …

Everyone in academia knows Reviewer 2. You ‘ve probably received their comments. You may even in a dark moment, have been them. This post is a practical guide to achieving full Reviewer 2 status. I…

Doctoral researchers are sometimes asked in their viva what their plans for dissemination are. Gulp. But this is a question worth thinking about. It’s not a trick question. Examiners are genu…

Graham Kendall studies academic publishing. He recently ran the numbers on what peer review costs the UK higher education sector. His calculations are worth quoting: “In the UK…

This is a guest post written by Dr Rachel Lehner-Mear. She has recently published a book reporting her doctoral research on mothers and primary school homework. There’s nothing quite like holding y…

Coherence in research design is not the same as coherence in academic writing, although the two are related. Research design coherence is sometimes described through the metaphor of a red thread, o…

Gratuitous pic of my dog Ted. A coherent piece of writing is one where the parts connect to the whole. That sounds obvious, but it can be difficult to achieve. That’s partly because the whole is su…

I’ve just read a paper about epistemic placemaking. Epistemic placemaking is equipping and arranging places for knowledge work. The paper suggests that students might actively co-design t…

Concision is not the same as brevity. A short piece of writing can be wasteful with its words, and a long piece can be meaning-full right to the last sentence. Getting concise is about getting clea…

Procrastination often gets a bad rap in academic writing advice circles. It’s generally seen as a problem to be managed, a symptom of anxiety or perfectionism. In other words, it’s a pr…

We’ve probably all read papers where the writer has treated the literature as something to be surveyed and reported. the result often takes the shape of the dreaded laundry list, where the writer p…

People often refer to writing as thinking without necessarily knowing where and how this idea developed. It is in part from Linda Flower and John Hayes who published a paper in 1981 offering a…

Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday 14 March, 2026 in Starnberg, near Munich. He was 96. The news has been moving through academic social media in the way these things do, with people sharing half-rem…

Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday 14 March, 2026 in Starnberg, near Munich. He was 96. The news has been moving through academic social media in the way these things do, with people sharing half-rem…

Good academic writing means sitting with a discomfort that never entirely goes away. It’s not a discomfort that comes from having nothing to say. Most of us have more than enough ideas crowding the…

Imagine a doctoral researcher finishing their introduction. They’ve carefully crafted the opening pages that situate their research question in the existing literature. Then they turn to write the …

This week we have launched the final report from the Sustainable School Leadership research project at the end of our 3 year mixed methods study across England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, funde…

In blues, jazz, and music that traces its roots to those genres, the riff is a repeated chord progression or set of notes that ties a song together. A guitar riff returns again and again in a song …

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a pol…

I’ve been thinking about all the writing that I need to get done this year. There’s three book contracts, yes three, and a host of papers which are undoubtedly going to need revising. Looking…

When you’re deep into writing a journal article, it’s easy to feel that every claim needs immediate validation, every statement must be backed up by a citation. This impulse becomes par…

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from staring at a word count that’s meant to reach 80,000 or 100,000, knowing you’re only at 12,000. Or from looking at a journa…

Don’t be tricksy. As with all stories, don’t play tricks on the reader. Don’t bring a rabbit out of the hat at the last moment. If there is a big reveal, make sure it’s planted well in advance. Don…

One of the most paralysing questions for academic writers is often the simplest: where do I start? For early career researchers staring at months of data, dozens of theoretical sources, and a loomi…

So you know what researcher positioning is and why it matters. Now comes the practical question: how do you actually write about it in your thesis? This is where many doctoral researchers get a bit…

You’ve probably come across the term “researcher positioning” in methods texts or heard it thrown around in doctoral seminars, and perhaps wondered what al the fuss is about. Posi…

Miss Marple, the quintessential ethnographer If you’re a doctoral researcher, you’re often expected to understand the relationship between methodology and methods from the get go. These two t…

Most research proposals, dissertations and funding bids start off with some kind of problem statement. A research/thesis problem statement needs to do several interconnected things to work well. At…

One of the things that separates just OK academic writing from really good academic writing is how smoothly it flows. You’ve probably read papers where every paragraph feels like a fresh star…

You’re finally sitting down to write your research proposal and you’ve hit that section where you need to outline your aims and objectives. You stare at the page. Aren’t these bas…

Doing a PhD can feel like wandering through a forest with no map. You’re constantly questioning whether you’re smart enough, working hard enough or heading in the right direction. If yo…

If you’re a PhDer, you’ve probably heard these terms thrown around in seminars, thesis committees, and paper reviews: “What’s your contribution?” and “Why is thi…

If you’re deep in the throes of doctoral work, you’ve probably had that moment where someone asks you about your “contribution to knowledge” and you freeze up like a deer in…

The UTS Governance Project is an independent, staff-led initiative to strengthen transparency, accountability and participation in how our university is run. Inspired by the ANU Governance Project, ...

Research results are not the same as research claims. This is one of those distinctions that sounds simple but can trip researchers up. But understanding the difference can be really helpful. …

Every academic writer knows the sting of a harsh review. Every one. Including me. We’ve all had them. The review that is scathing, brutal and toxic. The immediate impulse is often to fire bac…

If you do sociology or, indeed, any social science whatsoever, you’ll come across the work of Erving Goffman. I have done too but never engaged with it as much as I should have done. This was…