This webinar explores the main ideas in Alison and Mike's book - Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates and the accompanying online exercises. They explain why a critical literature review is vital for creating a convincing argument in your dissertation or thesis.

Alison and Mike consider questions like: What is an argument? What does 'convincing' mean? What does 'critical' mean? and explain how you can avoid just describing what others have said, so you add value within the literature review as a core aspect of your own research, rather than a tedious display of what you found in your searches!

Alison and Mike introduce techniques for evaluating what you read, to determine if it is convincing in its own right and if it is relevant to your own project. They show you what authors need to have done, for you to find their claims credible and useful.

And then they turn the tables. You as a writer need to use those same techniques to convince those who read your work critically - including your supervisors, examiners and readers of anything you publish. To this end, they explain how to construct a convincing argument, using appropriate evidence to support your claims.

By Mike Wallace and Alison Wray
Mike Wallace is a Professor of Public Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, where he teaches postgraduate courses on research methods. He was formerly an Associate Director of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), responsible for research capacity building in the management field, and also the Economic and Social Research Council's Strategic Adviser for Researcher Development. Alison Wray is a Research Professor of Language and Communication at Cardiff University. She has a longstanding commitment to researcher training, including the developing of academic expertise. She is co-author of Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates, now in its 4th edition (SAGE, 2021) and lead author of the popular undergraduate research methods textbook Projects in Linguistics (Hodder, 2012). Her research concerns the modelling of lexical storage and processing, particularly in relation to formulaic phrases, and it has been applied to language learning, evoluti