Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates

Mike Wallace is a Professor of Public Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. From 2009 to 2012 he was the Economic and Social Research Council’s Strategic Adviser for Researcher Development. His research on managing change in the public services is reported in many books and academic journals. He is co-author, with Eric Hoyle, of the book Educational Leadership: Ambiguity, Professionals, and Managerialism (Sage, 2005), lead editor, with Michael Fertig and Eugene Schneller, of the book Managing Change in the Public Services (Blackwell, 2007), and lead co-author, with Michael Reed, Dermot O′Reilly, Jonathan Morris, Michael Tomlinson and Rosemary Deem, of the book Developing Public Service Leaders: Elite Orchestration, Change Agency, Leaderism, and Neoliberalization (Oxford University Press, 2023). His contribution to teaching at Cardiff centres on the design of postgraduate research programmes incorporating research methods training.Alison Wray is Emerita Research Professor of Language and Communication at Cardiff University. One of her main research areas is lexical storage and processing, particularly formulaic expressions, applied to language learning, evolution of language and language disability. She has also extensively researched communication in the context of dementia. Her major monographs, Formulaic Language and the Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The Dynamics of Dementia Communication (Oxford University Press, 2020), are internationally acclaimed and award-winning. She has also written the scripts for three animated films used for training dementia carers. She has a longstanding commitment to researcher training and the development of academic expertise and is lead author of the popular undergraduate textbook Projects in Linguistics and Language Studies (Hodder, 2012).

This book provided invaluable practical help for me in both organising my approach to research and in writing my thesis. A real strength of the book is that it backs up the various approaches it suggests with worked examples of all the points made. As a result, I saw a genuine and marked improvement in the quality of my own writing.

• Part One: Becoming a Critical Reader and Self-Critical WriterChapter 1: What it Means to be CriticalChapter 2: Making a Critical ChoiceChapter 3: A First Look: Interrogating AbstractsChapter 4: Getting Started on Critical ReadingChapter 5: Getting Started on Self-Critical WritingChapter 6: Creating a Comparative Critical SummaryChapter 7: Developing Your Writing Skills to Communicate EffectivelyPart Two: Developing an In-Depth AnalysisChapter 8: A Mental Map for Navigating the LiteratureChapter 9: Tools for Thinking and Ways of ThinkingChapter 10: Reasons for Conducting the ResearchChapter 11: Knowledge Claims and Their Key CharacteristicsChapter 12: Developing a Critical Analysis of a TextChapter 13: A Worked Example of a Critical AnalysisChapter 14: Developing Your Argument in Writing a Critical Review of a TextPart Three: Putting Your Critical Reviews to WorkChapter 15: Focusing and Building up your Critical Literature ReviewChapter 16: Integrating Critical Literature Reviews into your DissertationChapter 17: Critical Literature Reviews in Alternative Dissertation StructuresChapter 18: Tools for Structuring a DissertationChapter 19: Using the Literature in Research Papers, Oral Presentations and PostersChapter 20: Developing Advanced Writing Skills