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).

• Part 1: 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 2: Developing an In-Depth AnalysisChapter 8: A Mental Map for Critical Reading and Self-critical Writing in DepthChapter 9: Tools for Thinking – Concepts and their CombinationsChapter 10: Ways of Thinking – Philosophical PositionsChapter 11: Reasons for Conducting the Research – Intellectual ProjectsChapter 12: Knowledge Claims – Creating Different Types of LiteratureChapter 13: Key Claim Characteristics – Certainty and GeneralizationChapter 14: Developing a Critical Analysis of a TextChapter 15: A Worked Example of a Critical AnalysisChapter 16: Developing Your Argument in a Critical Review of a TextChapter 17: Writing a Comparative Critical Review of Several TextsPart 3: Putting Your Critical Reviews to WorkChapter 18: Focusing and Building Up Your Critical Literature ReviewChapter 19: Integrating Critical Literature Reviews into Your DissertationChapter 20: Critical Literature Reviews in Alternative Dissertation StructuresChapter 21: Tools for Structuring a DissertationChapter 22: Using the Literature in Research Papers, Oral Presentations and PostersChapter 23: Understanding your Supervisor’s Feedback

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