I’ve been clearing out my book shelves. Getting rid of anything that I think I won’t actually look at again. It’s a pretty dusty dirty task as some of the books are quite old. They haven’t been opened for a long time. In order to work out what I want to keep I’ve found myself […] … learn more→

Writing a thesis or book is an enormous task that takes years and involves reading hundreds, sometimes thousands, of books, papers and articles. At the same time, you must produce your own words and make sure you don’t accidentally plagiarise other people. People end up with all kinds of home-brew solutions to solve this epic […] … learn more→

What do we think when someone asks us how we write? Probably, if our handwriting is legible or if we follow the spelling rules… but writing goes much further. Writing is representing thought through graphic symbols in a coherent, orderly and meaningful way, following a common thread and using language appropriate to the reader. Thus, the difficult […] … learn more→

Students’ education has been disrupted around the world by the Covid-19 crisis. In France, distance education imposed by confinement situations has thus increased educational inequalities linked to the social origins of children and adolescents. Beyond the digital divide relating to the material conditions of equipment, the differences in the uses of language, orally and even more so in writing, have undermined […] … learn more→

The war in Ukraine is being described as the first social media war, even as “the TikTok war”. Memes, tweets, videos and blog posts communicate both vital information and propaganda, potentially changing the course of history. This highlights the importance of agile and critical social media use. English in schools, in contrast, still focuses on […] … learn more→

Imagine yourself in a theatre. You choose to sit in the back row. You are the author of the play to be performed, and you have crept into the stalls after the lights go down. It is opening night and your words are about to be heard by a real audience. The stakes are high. […] … learn more→

Do you have a bit of writing that is stuck? I don’t mean you can’t get any words down on the page. I mean you have some writing where you just can’t work out what to do next. You think. You put the writing away for a bit. You go for a walk. You do […] … learn more→

I’ve been meaning to write this post all week. But I’ve not done so. And here I am on Sunday morning with the prospect of not having anything to publish, for the first time ever. I’ve sat at my desk on several occasions fully intending to write. But other things called to me – the […] … learn more→

You have research results. You want to write something – a book, a chapter, a paper. You’re in a field where there is already an active conversation. You’ve done an analysis which seems to repeat what is already out there. Noooo! You know that this probably isn’t going to be good enough; the publisher/editor is […] … learn more→

It’s the end of #acwrimo!! Did you take part in Academic Writing Month this year? I certainly did. It was lockdown, so this year we made a big deal of it at ANU. Not to put too fine a point on it, I taught my ass off. You can see some of the workshops I ran on my Workshops […] … learn more→