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 clear about meanings, not addressing the total word count. When you cut a sentence that does no work, or replace […] … learn more→

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 productivity failure. Writing advice givers like me have designed entire systems to overcome procrastination  – tomato timers, accountability partners, writing retreats, word-count targets. And yes, before we […] … learn more→

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 plods through their reading list book by book. Paper by paper. Summaries of what each source says, one by one. Occasionally the writer […] … learn more→

In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State. “The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In […] … learn more→

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 cognitive process theory of writing. And reading their paper again, now, shows that their observations are still pretty apt descriptions of the work that goes […] … learn more→

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-remembered seminars and dog-eared copies of books that changed how they thought. Let me situate Habermas for those of you who havent […] … learn more→

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 page. Not that. This discomfort is something more unsettling. The discomfort I am talking about is not the discomfort of avoidance, […] … learn more→

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 abstract and, faced with the daunting task of condensing everything into 250 words, they simply lift sentences wholesale from what they’ve just written. The abstract becomes a […] … learn more→

Academic reading and writing are key skills at university. They allow us to access diverse content, develop more complex thinking, and actively participate in academic life. It’s not just about understanding texts or writing papers, but also about knowing how to argue, synthesize ideas, and communicate them clearly and effectively. However, university students struggle with these types […] … learn more→

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 as though to tell listeners where they are, even as the instruments take excursions elsewhere. The song […] … learn more→