This reader has been designed to accompany Giltrow’s Academic Writing, one of the key principles of which is that there is a close connection between the processes of reading and of writing academic prose. Each reading is preceded by introductory commentary, questions, and suggestions for discussion, and the book also includes a brief general introduction.

As with Giltrow’s Academic Writing, her Academic Reading is a challenging text. At its core are examples of actual academic writing of the sort that students must learn to deal with daily, and to write themselves. As newcomers to the scholarly community, students can find that community’s ways of reading and writing mysterious, unpredictable and intimidating. Academic Reading demystifies the scholarly genres, shedding light on their discursive conventions. Throughout, Academic Reading respects the student writer; it engages the reader's interest without ever condescending, and it avoids entirely the arbitrary and the dogmatic.

The second edition is expanded to include twenty-one selections, nineteen of which come from scholarly publications, and more than half of which are new to this edition.

Janet Giltrow's profile page

Janet Giltrow is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of British Columbia. Her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literature, Sinn und Form, Style, Technostyle, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Review, and Technical Writing and Communication, and in collections on feminist narratology, genre theory, and ESL, as well as in collections on other topics in rhetoric and literary studies. She is a winner of the 3M Teaching Fellowship.

"An outstanding book, Academic Reading offers accessible examples of real scholarly discourse. Indeed, this is the only ‘across the disciplines’ reader that I have seen that accomplishes this effectively." - Brian Turner, University of Winnipeg

"An excellent selection of provocative essays; I will certainly adopt this text for my junior level composition course." - Kathleen Blumreich, Grand Valley State University