Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates

This guide to critical reading and self-critical writing is a must-have resource for postgraduate students and early-career academics. Packed with tools for analyzing texts and structuring critical reviews, and incorporating exercises and examples drawn from the social sciences, the book offers step-by-step advice on how to:

• Read any text critically and analyze it in the depth appropriate to one′s project
• Develop a self-critical approach to one′s own academic writing
• Ask questions in order to evaluate authors′ arguments
• Keep a review manageable by using focused review questions
• Structure a comparative review of multiple texts
• Build up a convincing argument
• Integrate critical literature reviews into a dissertation or thesis
• Make the transition from postgraduate to professional academic writer

Essential reading for novice researchers, the book will also be invaluable for supervisors, methods course tutors, and academic mentors who teach and support the development of critical reading and self-critical writing skills.

Mike Wallace is a Professor of Public Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. From 2009 to 2012 he was the Economic and Social Research Council’s Strategic Adviser for Researcher Development. His research on managing change in the public services is reported in many books and academic journals. He is co-author, with Eric Hoyle, of the book Educational Leadership: Ambiguity, Professionals, and Managerialism (Sage, 2005), lead editor, with Michael Fertig and Eugene Schneller, of the book Managing Change in the Public Services (Blackwell, 2007), and lead co-author, with Michael Reed, Dermot O′Reilly, Jonathan Morris, Michael Tomlinson and Rosemary Deem, of the book Developing Public Service Leaders: Elite Orchestration, Change Agency, Leaderism, and Neoliberalization (Oxford University Press, 2023). His contribution to teaching at Cardiff centres on the design of postgraduate research programmes incorporating research methods training.

Alison Wray is Emerita Research Professor of Language and Communication at Cardiff University. One of her main research areas is lexical storage and processing, particularly formulaic expressions, applied to language learning, evolution of language and language disability. She has also extensively researched communication in the context of dementia. Her major monographs, Formulaic Language and the Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The Dynamics of Dementia Communication (Oxford University Press, 2020), are internationally acclaimed and award-winning. She has also written the scripts for three animated films used for training dementia carers. She has a longstanding commitment to researcher training and the development of academic expertise and is lead author of the popular undergraduate textbook Projects in Linguistics and Language Studies (Hodder, 2012).