Table of Contents

1. Introduction: You may have academic writing troubles, but you can fix them!

2. ‘Your writing doesn’t sound very academic’: How to convince your reader you belong

3. 'Where’s your evidence for this?': Using what you know to make a case

4. ‘Your writing doesn’t flow’: Making your text coherent and fluent

5. ‘Waffle’: Improving readability by managing your extra words

6. ‘Uncritical!’: Taking a stand in your writing

7. ‘Where’s your discussion section?’: Structuring your work as a whole

8. The end of this book, but not the end of your dissertation

About the Author

Inger Mewburn is Director of Research Training at The Australian National University where she is responsible for co-ordinating, communicating and measuring all the centrally run research training activities and doing research on student experience to inform practice. Aside from editing and contributing to the Thesis Whisperer blog, she writes scholarly papers, books and book chapters about research student experiences, with a special interest in the digital practices of academics.Katherine Firth is an academic at La Trobe University, currently establishing a new Learning Hub across all their campuses. She has taught graduate writing across arts and sciences faculties since 2008, in the UK and Australia. She has built innovative online platforms supporting graduate writers and won a university prize for the innovative Thesis Boot Camp at the University of Melbourne. She has maintained a doctoral research and writing blog since 2013 and publishes in the fields of literature and musicology.Shaun Lehmann has been a teacher of English as a second language for a decade and is an interdisciplinary researcher with interests straddling human biology, anthropology and sociology. Shaun has also been involved with teaching academic skills and bridging courses for both domestic and international students for the Australian National University and has lectured in biological anthropology.