Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat? Achieving Proficiency in Academic Writing

This paper provides an overview of key aspects of proficiency in academic writing, by examining a corpus of 40 double-blind referee reports in the field of comparative labour law and industrial relations. It is argued that the principles of academic writing identified in the analysis have significant pedagogic implications, enabling both junior and senior researchers to identify aspects of their research that require further refinement. Reports by peer reviewers are shown to perform more than just a gatekeeping function, since many reviewers provide suggestions, references, and advice about legislation and case law, enabling authors submitting manuscripts to improve their work in the light of the expectations of scholars within the disciplinary domain. Through the peer review process, the unwritten rules of academic discourse in a given domain become more explicit, and the collaborative nature of much academic writing is highlighted, as a recursive and interactive process consisting of a number of stages with critical input at each stage from members of the discourse community.