HOW-TO BOOKS

The world of academia can be a strange place but if you get the chance to spend a year or more at a college or university, you should take it. As well as furthering your education, it opens up other cultures, helps you to find out how you think and gives you time and space to step back from all the usual daily demands just to get to know yourself better. As a lecturer and, afterwards, a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow, I spent lots of time with students, learning as much as I taught them and finding out the areas where they needed help. The books of advice on this page are distilled from my own experiences and those of friends and colleagues.

Brilliant Study Skills

Brilliant Study Skills aims to help students going to college or university to appreciate what’s required of them and develop the best strategies to deal with the various demands of a new learning environment. It draws on the researches and writings of Kathleen McMillan and Jonathan Weyers and on my own experiences as a lecturer and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow. As well as covering the obvious areas of writing, note-taking (and note-making, which isn’t the same), academic, researching and exam skills, it encourages readers to investigate what type of learning personality they have and how best to apply it to their studies. It looks at the whole spectrum from finding accommodation and planning finances to eventual graduation and career choices.

Reviews

The book would certainly benefit anyone new (school-leavers, international and mature students) to academic study. I wish I'd read it sooner! The structure of the book and straightforward and fun style of writing make it easy to dip in and out of. This will be a book I refer back to again and again.
Moira Nikodem, Amazon

… clearly set out, well written, practical yet thought provoking, easy to access and understand yet challenging. Without simplifying the issues and questions covered, or pretending that there are easy answers, the book will provide students with a better understanding of the issues and problems they will confront and develop the skills they will require to resolve them.
Dr Max Roach, Amazon

This is a book that students will use over and over again, throughout their university careers, and any parent wishing to give their son or daughter a helping hand would be wise to make sure they are equipped with Brilliant Study Skills.
Professor Jeanette King, Amazon

Brilliant Essay

The title speaks for itself. This is a book designed to help students overcome the frequently felt apprehension about academic writing. It demystifies the processes involved and moves from the initial interpretation of the essay question through brainstorming, reading skills, research techniques, note-making, structuring, reviewing, editing and presenting essays. It examines the basics of structure, gives guidance on grammar, spelling and punctuation, stresses how to use feedback and suggests how the various skills can be adapted to exam conditions.

Brilliant Dissertation

Once again, the title says it all. The book covers many of the areas dealt with in Brilliant Essay but with a greater, in-depth focus on research, resources, and the formal structures of advanced academic writing. It is for undergraduates faced with dissertations and/or project reports in the early years of university and at honours level and also postgraduates embarking on Masters or Doctoral theses.

Brilliant Workplace Skills

The fourth of my books in this series is designed to help students and graduates ease themselves into the workplace and avoid the pitfalls that await wherever they work. It’s wide ranging and covers many different working situations, with sections on office politics, problem solving, holding meetings, communications strategies and anything that might help to give the reader an advantage in what is always a competitive environment. It’s written in the deliberately easy style used for the first three books and it helps to build confidence, competence, and a broad awareness of what’s good and less good about the big world of work.

Just Write

Just Write is based on workshops I’ve given for students at universities in my role as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow. I co-wrote it with Kathleen McMillan, an excellent, amazingly dedicated lecturer at Dundee University. It’s aimed principally at helping students to cope with the demands of academic writing but our intention was to give it much wider scope and, most of all, to make it easy to read. When I started my first writing fellowship, I had to stop and think about the actual process of writing. I’d always written, but never stopped to ask what I was actually doing or how I went about it. Just Write breaks the process down into phases and, we think, could be useful for anyone who has to write something in any context.

Review

“I bought this book thinking it would help my son when he went to University last year to study English. I recently noticed it on his bookshelf, well thumbed and filled with post-it notes. I asked him if it was ‘good’? He said it was ‘great’.”
Janice, Amazon