Resources for Academic Writing

1. Thinking through writing

• Writing as Theorising for Language Education (2025). Useful when you want to use reflective and reflexive writing to connect classroom experience with theory.
• Writing Together: Reflections on the Craft, Dynamics, and Politics of Co-Authorship (2025). Useful when you are about to write with others and want to think through the forms, tools and ethics of co-authorship.

2. Writing your dissertation or research report

• Writing an MA dissertation (2024). Useful when you are starting a dissertation and want to hear from students who have been through the process, including the challenges they faced.
• Writing a Literature Review: Three Tasks, Not One (2026). Useful when you are drafting a literature review and are not sure what belongs where.
• How not to do a research project (2014). Useful when you are planning classroom-based or student research and want to avoid problems that can compromise it.
• Thinking about how to present multilingual data and Presenting multilingual data: Some options (2014). Useful when your data are in more than one language and you need to decide how to represent them in your report.

3. From manuscript to publication

• How to avoid desk rejections (2014). Useful when you are preparing a manuscript and want to understand why some are rejected before they reach reviewers.
• Is it ever OK to cite your own work? (2014). Useful when you are unsure whether, and how, to cite your earlier publications.
• Can I publish a conference paper in a journal? (2014). Useful when you want to turn a conference paper into a publication.
• What happens to an article after it has been submitted to a journal? (2018). Useful when you have submitted and want to understand the processes that follow.
• Publishing the ‘Greek Tragedy’ chapter (2014). Useful when you want a step-by-step account of how a chapter in an edited collection gets published.

Doctoral Study and Getting Published is a collection edited by Richard Fay and myself, which explores some of the technical aspects of becoming a published author, such as finding (or constructing) an academic identity, the experience of writing, working with co-authors and critical peers, being part of an academic community, and engaging with publishers.

Rather than presenting the writing process as a set of rules, the book brings together the experiences of early career researchers affiliated with, or associated with the Language Teacher Research Network at the University of Manchester, to show how people actually learn to become researchers: through uncertainty, feedback, relationships, participation in academic communities, and encounters with reviewers and editors.

Our goal, as curators of these narratives, was to help make academic writing and academic becoming less opaque processes. The narratives show that becoming a researcher is not simply about mastering technical skills, but about learning how scholarly communities work, developing confidence and identity, and persisting through revision and setbacks.

For those considering practitioner research, postgraduate study or publication, the book offers insight into the lived experience behind academic research, and into the kinds of support, relationships and opportunities that help researchers develop.

4. Peer review, from both sides

• Peer review: The good, the bad and the ugly (2018). Useful when you have received difficult feedback and want to learn from it.
• How to write a peer review (2026). Useful when you have been asked to review a manuscript and want your review to help editors decide and authors act, including where AI can and cannot responsibly help.

5. Beyond the article

• How to present a conference paper (2014). Useful when you are preparing an academic presentation.
• How to engage with feedback in a conference presentation (2014). Useful when you want to make the most of the discussion that follows your talk.
• Thinking about setting up an academic blog? (2014). Useful when you are considering blogging as part of your academic writing.
• Fifteen years of Academic Blogging: Writing Slowly in Public (2025). Useful when you want to think about the blog as a space for slow, public writing and unfinished ideas.

6. Knowing the publishing landscape

Good writing also needs a good home. These posts may help you decide where to send your work.

• Where can I find calls for papers for TESOL? (2014). Useful when you have a paper and are not sure where to publish it.
• How to spot a predatory journal (and why to avoid them!) (2018) and What do predatory journals look like? (2015). Useful when you are choosing a journal and want to avoid scams.