I have to submit my book to the publisher at the end of June. So now I need to edit it through to make it ready to be read. The huge task is not to waste this opportunity, having done all this work, to make sure that it really says …

The writing continues and I’m in danger of losing the sense of structure and storyline. I’m also anxious that parts of it are making no sense. I move some things to different places and even split some chapters into two. Finding new headings and subheadings really does work to fix …

So I have got a nice piece of data. It emerged from my analysis as a good example of a particular theme. I paste it onto the page and work out how to introduce it. It has wider margins to show that it’s data. I begin to write about it, …

These are further thoughts, following my last blog, about how we continue to generate meaning throughout the writing process and that research doesn’t finish once the writing has begun. Perhaps we carried out interviews, and that stage is now finished. Perhaps we are no longer directly in contact with the …

I’m once again alone with my writing. In long texts especially it is possible to feel lost, and also on the screen, where you scroll on and on and back and back. You can certainly have written a lot; but then it begins to lose form, and you begin to …

One of my PhD students recently did a short certificate training course in teaching English as a foreign or other language. As a full-time student in her final year, time is short and needs to be well used. So one might wonder if doing this course was a good idea. …

The sense-making about how to write continues. A colleague asked one of my students where the reference to theory was in her data chapter. She had presented good extracts and said good things about them in the right style – thoughtful, critical, even good thick description in the way she …

Please note that the blogs before September 2020 that have been deleted from this page and have been published as a Kindle book.

One of the comments on my last post about my use of ‘Orientalist grand narrative‘ as a core concept in my book made me think again. Thank you for that Mona. It made me realise that the book is not about the Orientalist grand narrative, but instead uses it as …