Further Reading
Table of Contents
First Things First
As mentioned throughout this crash course website, always check your assignment’s instructions first. They will provide you with valuable information on how to complete your writing assignment. They may give you certain parameters to work within, set specific challenges, or give you quota that need to be reached (e.g., minimum number of academic sources). In many cases, they will even give you a more or less strict template to follow when structuring your text (sometimes even giving you word ranges per section). Follow these instructions to the letter, and remember that they take precedence whenever they contradict anything mentioned in this crash course.
When you are writing a thesis, specifically, your teachers will typically also supply you with detailed documentation on how to write this assignment as part of your wider course materials. Be sure to read such documentation carefully, and treat it in the same way as the specific assignment instructions.
Wout’s Recommendations
When I was writing my PhD, a senior colleague recommended Graff and Birkenstein’s They say ? I say to me, and I have been recommending the book to my own students ever since. It is a short but insightful introduction to academic writing: a quick read full of stock phrases and sentence templates that can be incredibly useful for students who looking for good ways to formulate their critical thoughts and turn them into nuanced scholarly prose. What I personally found especially valuable, however, was how it helped me think more about the way in which I phrased my writing to make my own contribution to the wider academic debate more clear to the reader. At the time, I read the book’s third edition, but the authors have continued to update it ever since. Its current, sixth edition, also includes some tips on how to deal with (and disclose the permitted use of) AI-generated tools, specifically.
References
Graff, G., & Birkenstein, C. (2024). “They say / I say”: The moves that matter in academic writing (Sixth edition). W.W. Norton & Company.