Blog

Yet another book? Yes, but the last one for a while, I promise!

Just popping into the blog to say that Level Up your Essays, the new book with Inger and Shaun, is now out in the world. It is beautiful, red-lacquered and shiny. The pages are generous, and the worksheets invite you to get in there and scribble all over them.

While this book isn’t aimed primarily at PhD students or researchers, there are a few golden resources that will definitely be relevant for you. I love our section on ways to make logical progressions using the LATCH principles (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy) (thanks Inger!), the Cornell Method of Notetaking (something you know I’m passionate about), and some advice about writing academic English as a second language (thanks Shaun!).

This book is also useful to anyone who is teaching undergraduates to write (most researchers are teachers too!). It can be challenging to give feedback in ways that really help students improve. We have simple, fun explanations of how to use graduate-level strategies in ways that undergraduates can use: like Swales and Feak’s sentence skeletons or Kristen Luker’s bedraggled daisies strategy.

Even better, this book is about half the price of even my other ‘affordable’ books. Available in paperback or ebook at all the usual outlets!

This book collects together a lot of work I was doing back when I was an Academic Skills Advisor, when I had just started this blog. The blog was such a great resource in writing this book, as well as being a place to reflect on the process of working in an authorship team, writing a book, editing it, and getting it published. Thank you for your part of being on this journey!

SHARE

Succeeding in a Research Higher Degree

Doing a Research Higher Degree (like a PhD) is hard, but lots of people have succeeded and you can too. It’s easier if you understand how it works, this blog gives you the insider view.

Contact

Related Posts

The blog is back

Not only is Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond now in to my publishers, but we have a publication date and a preorder link.

Read More

The story of my thesis

If you have ever been to one of my workshops in the last decade, you will probably have done this warm up. In fact, if you came to a multi-day writing retreat I ran, you would have done this at the beginning of each day. It is the most powerful, most flexible, simplest tool in my writing tool box.

Read More

How to unstick your reading list

As I was getting to the end of the recent book, I was buying books at my usual pace but not reading them (as that brainspace was completely taken up with reading my own draft or references for the draft).

Now the book is in and the summer has started, I felt excited to dive into all these books but I also felt stuck. I couldn’t get into gear, let alone find my groove.

So I rummaged around in my toolbox, and came up with this list of techniques. None of them are perfect, but little by little we are turning the dial back to reading.

Read More

Get the latest blog posts