For those of you writing a research paper based upon a systematic review of the literature, here are some notes on writing your paper.
There is an excellent site that addresses the issue of research writing by Raewyn Connell. Here is some of the detail:
WRITING FOR RESEARCH
WRITING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE
The e-booklet now has a section about writing in English as a second language.
WRITING FOR RESEARCH, THE E-BOOKLET!
The eight episodes of "Writing for Research" have now been reorganized and turned into a 42-page booklet in glorious technicolor. We hope this will make it easier to access and use.
It’s registered with Creative Commons and can be downloaded and circulated for free. (If you circulate it, please say where it came from, so other people can find the material too.)
What follows below is an assorted set of encouragements, ideas and nudges that apply to most forms of scholarly writing and writing in general
Writing is a solitary activity that is impossible without a supportive community. The purportedly proper name of the author is always a pseudonym for others—some known, some unknown, some living, many dead—others who speak through the writer’s words, which are never his own.
Taylor, M. C. (2014). Speed Limits: where time went and why we have so little of it. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 9
This via @briandavidearp
A sentiment which is echoed in the final link on this page.
There are different purposes to which writing can be put:
- writing for yourself in your notebooks.
- writing for informal publication, i.e. social media, in this course, the weekly writing on the Slack site
- writing for formal publication such as you will do for your draft research paper
There are some notes about writing in the Research Kitchen.
Reflections on reflective writing
There is a staggering set of resources for helping with writing.
One of the common characteristics of folk who write well is that they write regularly, daily and often have a target number of words. How different people write is always a matter of secret academic business, i.e. practices that no one else gets to see. The nearest you can get to what other folk do when they write is read about their routines, habits, tricks and kludges and hope they reflect something of what goes on.
This short piece by Jenny Davidson1 is about the eloqence of some sentences. Good writing for any purpose is still good writing. Learning from folk who write for other purposes is as useful as reading guides on how to write for academic purposes. To that end, Maria Popova's blog has a wonderful collection of ideas and advice about writing, by excellent writers2.
How different people actually write is not often shared. This piece is a useful account that reflects an approach to writing that is popular with a number of writers.
And then read this brief piece if all you need is a nudge to begin pressing keys of making marks on paper.
Given the amount of writing that appears online, like blogs and similar writing, there is no shortage of advice about how to do it, and how to think3 about your writing. There is a very useful source called the Academic Phrasebank (ht Bernie P).