First Steps In Academy: Books

This book provides a foundation and framework to enhance your understanding of the various processes involved in academic writing. The term, academic writing, here refers to the types of writing used in college level writing courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. However, this book was not written simply to help you pass another English class or to get you through the next writing intensive course (although it will certainly do that). At some point you will be out in the real world (hopefully). Thus, the purpose of this book is to enable you to be an effective writer and thinker in all contexts including your personal and professional lives.

An A to W of Academic Literacy is designed for graduate students of all language backgrounds and at any level of study. It is created as a comprehensive reference for graduate students. As a glossary of terms, it can also be used as a supplemental textbook for graduate workshops and seminars and by writing consultants and instructors across the disciplines.   The guide includes 65 common academic literacy terms and explores how they relate to genres, writing conventions, and language use. Each entry briefly defines the term, identifies variations and tensions about its use across disciplines, provides examples, and includes reflection questions. An appendix lists further readings for each entry.   Unique to this volume are comments featuring the experiences of the graduate students who wrote the entries, comments that bring each entry to life and build a bridge to graduate student readers.   

Conducting phenomenological research for dissertations can be an involved and challenging process, and writing it up is often the most challenging part. How to Write a Phenomenological Dissertation gives students practical, applied advice on how to structure and develop each chapter of the dissertation specifically for phenomenological research.  Phenomenology is about personal experience and personal experience varies from researcher to researcher. However, this variation is a big source of confusion for new researchers in the social, behavioral, or health sciences. This brief text is written in a simple, step-by-step fashion to account for this flexibility and variation while also providing structure necessary for a successful dissertation. Broken up into chapters that follow each chapter of the dissertation, this text logically addresses the various parts of phenomenological research, starting with ensuring phenomenology is the right method for your research, writing the literature review, going through methods and results sections to analysis and discussion. The author, using experience gleaned from supervising phenomenological dissertations for many years, gives time-tested advice on how structure the dissertation to fit into more common frameworks, using checklists and tables throughout. Each chapter includes a list of helpful resources for students to use alongside this book with specific information on methods and research. Unique to this text is a chapter on creating your own phenomenological method which allows students to expand their viewpoints and experiment in future studies after the dissertation.