My Most Recent Publications
If you’re a senior leader in education, a creative writer who loves science fiction and fantasy, a researcher in education or the social sciences, or just a curious person, my three most recent publications are for you
Reporting to Governance: Effective Communication while Adhering to the Nolan Principles
If you’re in the public sector, the Nolan Principles [link] remind you that your work should be carried out honestly, transparently, and with the good of the public uppermost in your mind. In this chapter, I show that these principles also apply to your writing, especially when it comes to high stakes reports that will impact many lives. Do you know what your argument is? Have you set it out clearly? Have you dealt with the evidence fairly and rigorously? Have you made conscious decisions about your prose, such as when, where, and whether you will use the active or passive voice? As I show in this piece, these writerly decisions are also ethical decisions, and they should be made in line with the Nolan Principles.
Science Fiction, the Future, and Now: Some Mid-Life Reflections from a Life-Long Fan
In this fond reflection, I return to the science fiction of my youth and explore how it relates to the world we find ourselves in today. I look at things that have not come to pass, things that have, and things where we seem to be teetering just on the edge. When I first wrote this piece, generative AI was in the just teetering category; it has since come to pass. The concerns I share remain the same: what looks at first like a transformative time-saving convenience may in the long run erode our capacity for independent thought and creative problem-solving. If we let generative AI think and write for us, how long before we lose the capacity to think for ourselves? This is the question I urge us to ask ourselves now that we are living in one of our long-predicted science fiction futures.
Stylistics, Pop Culture, and Educational Research: A Systematized Review and Case Study
Linguistic analysts like me and researchers in education don’t talk to each other much. That’s a shame and in this article, I take on the task of putting us in greater dialogue. I focus on an object of study that interests us both, popular culture texts like films and television shows that feature teachers and teaching. I show in my systematised review that educational research tends to treat these texts as documents rather than art drawn in language. This leads to illuminating but often content-driven interpretations. In response, I offer an alternative, a literary stylistic analysis of an episode of The Big Bang Theory that features an English language learner. I use conversation analysis to interpret the dialogue and demonstrate how this linguistic approach moves us beyond content and opens up readings on how we actually use language, moment to moment and turn by turn, to construct social phenomena such as belonging and exclusion.
My Academic Publications
As an academic, I began my career in literary stylistics, analysing the way language works in fiction, drama, and television dialogue. My publication record reflects that, from my 2007 study of weird -y suffixes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to my analysis of language and power in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter in 2017.
This is the work that gives my workshops on language awareness for creative writers their distinctive edge, and the work that demonstrates how I put the literature review skills I teach into action in my own writing.
What Do I Write?
Here at Writing Works Consulting, I live my craft. If you’re interested in reading what I publish, have a look:
That’s why I am absolutely thrilled to announce my latest writing project:
A Duoethnography with my long-time friend and colleague Iain Rowan, award-winning short story writer and novelist. Iain has sold over 30 short stories. He won second place in the 2020 Costa Short Story Award and the 2025 Dinesh Allirajah Short Fiction Prize, and his novel was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger and the Bath Novel Awards. Iain was also awarded a Northern Writers Award.
A duoethnography is a form of qualitative research that involves two professionals who serve as each other’s research participants. In a series of research conversations that we have and then analyse, we put our two different understandings of how fiction works in contact and contrast in order to generate new understandings and new ways of working.
If that all sounds a bit textbook-y, think of it as politely throwing a spanner into each other’s habituated ways of understanding in order to learn something new about ourselves as researchers and writers. Transformed by this learning, we then take our work forward in innovative ways, influencing our respective fields as we go.
Any other duoethnographers out there? Or creative writers or stylistic analysts? Get in touch! We’d love to know what you think.
What I’m Writing Now
I spent many years analysing the language of fiction, drama and television dialogue, using an array of linguistic methods in my well-stocked toolkit. Following the convention in my field as a literary linguist, my focus remained squarely on the text. My questions were always about what the language could be taken to indicate, not what authors intended, so when I got to the borders of the text I stopped.
But the longer I went in my career, the more curious I became about what an author would make of the patterns I’d found in the language she or he had produced. What would they think of my take on what those patterns meant? What would those patterns mean to them? How would they understand or respond to them?
