Lecturers, request your electronic inspection copy here

Reading critically, and writing using critical techniques, are crucial skills you need to apply to your academic work. Practical and engaging, Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates is bursting with tools for analysing texts and structuring critical reviews, helping you to gradually build your skills beyond undergraduate level and gain confidence in your ability to critically read and write.

New to this 3rd edition:

• Introduces a technique for developing critical thinking skills by interrogating paper abstracts

• Additional diagrams, exercises and concept explanations, enabling you to more easily understand and apply the various approaches

• A glossary, to help with understanding of key terms.

Also new for this edition, a Companion Website provides additional resources to help you apply the critical techniques you learn. From templates and checklists, access to SAGE journal articles and additional case studies, these free resources will make sure you successfully master advanced critical skills.

If you need to engage with published (or unpublished) literature such as essays, dissertations or theses, research papers or oral presentations, this proven guide helps you develop a reflective and advanced critical approach to your research and writing.

SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills website for tips, resources and videos on study success!

This updated and expanded edition contains a welcome revision of a very useful guide to critical reading, writing and thinking in academic work. It provides an extremely detailed step-by-step guide to engaging with several types of academic literature and it presents numerous worked examples of how critical writing should be done. The book should be regarded as essential reading for postgraduate students, especially with regard to the preparation of dissertations and theses. It will also be of great value for academics engaged in the critical review of literature in their respective fields and for critical reflection upon their own work for publication. -- Alan Phipps

This book will be a must read for my research students. It is practical with its various techniques and strategies, without being prescriptive. It will build your confidence in critically engaging with what you read and, because the authors treat reading and writing as an intertwined process, it will help with evidencing your own claims, identifying gaps in your arguments and seeing the assumptions you forget you are making. Indeed this book has the capacity to support us all to become better writers.

Mike Wallace is a Professor of Public Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. He is an Associate Director of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), responsible for research capacity building in the management field. He is also the Economic and Social Research Council's Strategic Adviser for Researcher Development. Mike is series editor of the Sage Learning to Read Critically series of books. His own research on managing change in the public services is reported in many books and academic journals. Alison Wray is a Research Professor of Language and Communication at Cardiff University. Her research concerns the modelling of lexical storage and processing, particularly in relation to formulaic phrases, and it has been applied to language learning, evolution of language and language disability. Her two monographs Formulaic Language and the Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries (Oxford University Press, 2008) are internationally acclaimed. Her current research is into dementia communication. She has a longstanding commitment to researcher training, including the developing of academic expertise. She is lead author of the popular undergraduate research methods textbook Projects in Linguistics (Hodder, 2012).