How to begin...?

Azariadis (2011, p. 6) It can be hard to begin to tease out what we want to say when writing up a research idea. Recently I sent a stud...

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The characteristics of a 'just right' paragraph

Ah, the paragraph. I have made a few posts on this topic ( here ), but there is always a bit more to do, especially when someone as guru-lik...

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Building academic writing skills

The courses I teach on have a number of older people enrolling who are interested in adding to their knowledge kete. However, a long time ma...

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Avoiding fragmented paragraphs

I had a great question from a student asking what I meant by a paragraph being fragmented. Paragraphs are fragmented when there are a number...

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Writing good paragraphs

In order to write good paragraphs in academic writing, there are some key components that we need to address. Inger Mewburn (2021) put out a...

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Darwin studied finches

Earlier this year I read a great blog post by Thesis Whisperer, Inger Mewburn, on how to write a sentence in a clear and understandable way....

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Argument - find the gap

In academic writing, and particularly in the literature review, we are "seeing fault, error or other possibilities in the work of anoth...

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Why we need paragraphs

As I mentioned in my last post, I wrote about Professor Brabazon's great post on the paragraph ( here ; 2020). I have already summarised...

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More on the paragraph

Writing a paragraph is a topic I have tackled before ( here ), but recently, Dean of Graduate Research at Adelaide University, Tara Brabazon...

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Writing paragraphs

Azariadis (2011, p. 6) When we are creating argument, the key tool we use for this is a paragraph. We often don't tend to think ab...

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Summarising Findings

In my teaching work, one of the hardest things is to teach students how to summarise their findings. It is a hard to get them to summarise...

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Lead paragraphs with words, not numerals

There are lots of rules about using numbers in writing. Generally, writing manuals and style guides tell us to write out whole numbers fro...

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The Laundry List Lit Review

My local PhD advisor told me off for giving my power away in my writing by starting off a paragraph with "X says, and Y says", s...

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Cutting the fat

Does the idea of editing text to trim the fat make you grind your teeth? Yep, it does me too. However, sometimes when we write we add in l...

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