Patricia Goodson - Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing

In this second edition, the most substantive change is the addition of Appendix A, Reading-&-Writing: How to Stop Making the Literature Review an Excuse for Not Writing. I added this material in response to requests for addressing in more depth the literature review portion of academic writing. I confess I struggled with how best to do this. I did not want to write a tutorial on literature reviewsthat would take another book to do the material any justice. In the end, I decided to add what I teach in the POWER Writing Studios and my classes about how to read and write simultaneously, along with a system for doing so. Because the information did not lend itself to a series of exercises, I opted for the appendix format. I hope you find it useful.

Other changes in this edition include the POWER in Practice text boxes added to each chapter. The authors of these testimonials are, or have been, POWER consultantsan integral part of the POWER Services I describe in Research Shows boxes allow readers to take a brief break from the main topic and learn about research on various other facets of academic writing.

One smaller change is a list of each chapters main points in a single page (or less), at the end of the chapter. In the first edition, the main points appeared in the beginning, but the outline format seemed to contradict my recommendation not to outline before writing (see , Exercise 22). This new summary provides one to two sentences capturing the main points of each chapter, to help you better recall the text.

Other minor changes include adding a new checklist for obtaining various types of feedback (see ); updating information; removing obsolete links; and adding new items to Appendix B, Additional Resources. Most of the original text, however, remains unaltered.

As I stated in the first edition, this remains a work in progress, and your feedback is important for keeping the work alive and well! Please feel free to comment, ask questions, or just say hello by e-mail or Google+. Heres my address: patgoodson777@gmail.com.

Wishing you much success and a joy-filled writing career.

Patricia Goodson

College Station, Texas, 2015

I never imagined writing a book like this. Yet here we are, this book and I, attempting to motivate you to write more, write better, and publish your academic work. I cant help but feel both wonder and surprise when I reflect on the journey that led us here.

One reason I never expected to write such a book lies in my professional training. Having started my career in linguistics, I eventually found an academic home in health education and a research specialty in adolescent sexuality. While I managed to sustain an interest in all things language related, prior to this book, my academic writing comprised reports on evaluations of sex education programs, development of new contraceptives, and studies of adolescents sexuality. My previous book critiqued current health behavior theories; it had little to do with language or writing, except for the approach I employed. In that text, I challenged readers to view social science theories as stories, as narratives written by scholars to explain why people do what they do.