Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates

In Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates Second Edition, the authors show students how to read critically and how to write using critical techniques. This book is a 'must-have' resource for postgraduate students and early-career academics. It has been expanded and updated to include:

• A range of examples encompassing disciplinary areas including linguistics, education, business and management
• Commentaries on using e-resources and features of e-research
• New and additional material available online including access to journal articles

This book is for postgraduate students, methods course tutors and researchers.

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
  

Mike Wallace is a Professor of Public Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. He is an Associate Director of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), responsible for research capacity building in the management field. He is also the Economic and Social Research Council’s Strategic Adviser for Researcher Development. Mike is series editor of the Sage Learning to Read Critically series of books. His own research on managing change in the public services is reported in many books and academic journals.

Alison Wray is a Research Professor of Language and Communication at Cardiff University. Her research centres on the modelling of lexical storage and processing, particularly in relation to formulaic phrases, and it has been applied to language learning, evolution of language and language disability. Her two monographs Formulaic Language and the Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries (Oxford University Press, 2008) are internationally acclaimed. She has a longstanding commitment to researcher training, including the developing of academic expertise.