Academic Writing for Students - A Practical Guide

I was about halfway through my Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh Business School when I was asked to write a book on academic writing for students. The opportunity struck me as a highly significant one. At that time, I was writing five papers and working on a few book chapters along with my thesis. I had a fair idea of what the current academic writing sessions are not able to cover, particularly the mistakes students usually make and unusually make. My international experience at conferences and being President of the Doctoral Society provided me with an edge to deal with many international doctoral and postgraduate students. I accepted the offer to write the book for the students to deal with the pragmatic aspects of writing. Since then, I have been busy researching the title and uncovering the real need for the book with the students. I felt passionately that there was a group of international students who had a great thought process but were underrepresented in most of the academic writing sessions. One of the key concerns for the students was 'who they were writing for'. For instance, for their thesis, the audience is external and internal examiners; for journal articles, a domain-specific practitioner and academic audience; and for newspapers, it could be a more generic audience. Most of the books inform students 'what is right or wrong in academic writing' i.e., how they can present or represent their literature, data, structure, and references; some of them also guide on the correctness of English; yet, there is a gap in understanding 'for whom they are writing for'. To sum up, in this book, I provide a broad roadmap for how to start academic writing in practice from three perspectives: 1) What a student should know about academic writing before actually starting to write and what kind of difficulties he or she faces; 2) The problems that supervisors and editors of journals usually encounter with academic writing undertaken by students, both local and international.