Resources for academic writing

Resources by topic area:

Academic writing

  • Bartholomae, David (1986). Inventing the university. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1), 4-23.
  • Bazerman, Charles (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. In John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, & Donald N. McCloskey (Eds.), The rhetoric of the human sciences: Language and argument in scholarship and public affairs (pp. 125-144). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Belcher, Wendy Laura (2009). Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic publishing success. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.
  • Boice, Robert (1990). Professors as writers: A self-help guide to productive writing. New Forums.
  • Goldberg, Natalie (1986). Writing down the bones: Freeing the writer within. Suggestions, encouragement, and advice on writing from “first thoughts”, on listening, on using verbs, on overcoming doubts, even on choosing where to write.
  • Hearne, Betsy (in press). Ida Waters turns off the lights: The inside and outside of knowledge.
  • Prior, Paul, & Shipka, Jody (2002). Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of literate activity. In Bazerman, Charles, & Russell, David (Eds.), Writing selves/writing societies: Research from activity perspectives. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/
  • Shields, Patricia M. (2000). STEP by STEP: Building a research paper. New Forums.
  • Shields, Patricia M. (2010, April 10). Writing excellent research papers [ppt]. ASPA Student Summit.
  • Silvia, Paul J. (2007). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Writing a thesis/dissertation

  • Bolker, Joan (1998). Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day. New York: Holt. Field-tested strategies for the entire process, including choosing a topic and an advisor, disciplining one’s self to work at least fifteen minutes a day, setting short-term deadlines, revising, publication, and life after the dissertation.
  • Booth Wayne C.; Colomb, Gregory G.; Williams, Joseph M; Bizup, Joseph; & Fitzgerald, William T. (2016). The craft of research (4th edition). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  • Bruce, Bertram C. (2016). Writing the dissertation.
  • Feak, Christine B., & Swales, John M. Telling a research story: Writing a literature review. Michigan Series in English for Academic & Professional Purposes.
  • Levine, S. Joseph (2104). Writing and presenting your thesis or dissertation.
  • Lovitts, Barbara E., & Wert, Ellen L. Developing quality dissertations in the social sciences: A graduate student’s guide to achieving excellence.
  • Single, Peg Boyle (2009). Demystifying dissertation writing: A streamlined process from choice of topic to final text. Stylus.
  • Zerubavel, Eviatar (1999). The clockwork muse: A practical guide to writing theses, dissertations, and books. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Writing conference, thesis, and dissertation proposals.

Qualitative research

  • Bruce, Bertram C. (2016). Research memos.
  • Gubrium, J., & Holstein, J. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of interview research: Context & method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. (2009). InterViews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Power and language

Teaching writing

  • Bartholomae, David (1986). Inventing the university. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1). “Students have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily and comfortably one with their audience, as though they were members of the academy, or historians or anthropologists or economists; they have to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language, finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline.”
  • Good, Tina LaVonne (2007). In our own voice. New York: Longman. Focus on learning to teach writing; offers first-person narratives by graduate students on politics in the freshman composition classroom, the issue of authority, personal vs. formal academic writing, responding to student papers, and correcting grammar.

Graduate writing groups

Writers talking about their writing

Related syllabi

  • Strain, Kimberly (2016, Fall). WRIT 5051-1: Graduate research: writing practice for non-native speakers of American English. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.