Note to Students

For students and novice research writers and scholars, this book is intended as an important resource for navigating academic writing, specifically empirical research write-ups. It will help students identify functions of the research article as a whole and explore authors’ meaning as they write each section of the research article, in addition to supplying strategies for understanding research writing within students’ individual disciplines and yielding helpful tips for planning for, outlining, drafting, and reviewing their own research reports.

We encourage you to consult the “How to Use this E-book” segment of the book prior to getting started. This page helps you navigate the book’s features and primes you for using the text so that you get the most out of it. You’ll learn how to use the warm-up activities to start reflecting on your own writing processes, where to find authentic examples of instructed content that are included for illustration purposes, how to best explore published writing in your own field to understand published authors’ use of certain research article section-specific goals and strategies, and how to apply these concepts to successfully draft your own research article.

As you encounter interactive tasks and activities in this e-book, please complete them! They are inserted intentionally to engage you with the material and to prompt you to discover more about the academic writing standards and conventions in your own discipline. Your recognition of what makes quality research writing in your field will help you as you craft your own research writing and assist greatly with your progress as an independent academic writer.