From the outset of your postgraduate or doctoral studies, or your work as an academic, it is likely that you will be expected critically to read texts selected from the academic literature. Your critical reading effort will soon be directed towards writing for assessment, whether an assignment, a dissertation or thesis, or a paper for presentation at an academic conference.

Official expectations reflected in the criteria for assessing your writing may include the requirement that you develop your own argument, critically evaluating the arguments put forward in the literature. Your task is then to make your argument convincing to your assessors. They will become the critical readers of your written account, evaluating your argument about what you have read.

So critical reading and writing your account for assessment follow the logic of enquiry. They provide you with an opportunity consciously to practise learning how to think like an experienced management researcher:

• in your reading as you prepare to write for assessment, you adopt a sceptical stance, evaluating authors' arguments as they bear on your focus

• in planning your subsequent writing for assessment you work out how to convince your assessors - who wil adopt a sceptical stance towards your work - by developing as strong an argument as you can about what you have read relating to your focus

The authors of the literature you read will have done their best to convince their projected audience. So you can learn from examining, as you read, how they try to do this through the structure and the content of their account. You could note what authors do that: 

• fails to communicate their argument to you (e.g. their writing style contains lots of very long sentences whose meaning is hard to grasp) 

• fails to convince you of their argument (e.g. they don’t back up their claims with any evidence that would make you ready to accept them)

• communicates their argument well to you (e.g. they set their argument out in a logical sequence of short sentences that helps you understand each step of their logic)

• convinces you of their argument (e.g. they offer plenty of strong enough evidence to back up their claims)

Consciously noting how authors structure their account and what does or doesn’t communicate well or convince you can be a source of ideas: about what you should avoid doing and what you should try to do in structuring your own writing. This is an easy way for you to accelerate your learning to think like an experienced management researcher - throughout your academic studies.

The final introductory activity consists of an exercise to help you balance developing a critical approach in your academic reading with a self-critical approach to your academic writing for assessment by other critical readers.