Beverly A. Lewin

Beverly A. Lewin

Beverly A. Lewin has devoted 30 years of research and teaching to exploring and explaining scientific writing. Her first book, based on her Ph.D. dissertation, Expository discourse: A genre-based approach to social science research texts (London: Continuum, 2001) with J. Fine, and L. Young, delineates the expected structure of Introductions and Discussions in social science articles while providing a system for analyzing any expository genre. (Also available at Amazon.)

The description of the social science research genre is important both for those teaching English to speakers of other languages and to researchers of discourse structure. For teachers, the detailed analysis of texts provides a basis for teaching students to produce research articles. For researchers, the qualitative and quantitative analyses show how the different units of the genre are related to each other.

Writing readable research: A guide for students of social science, in contrast, is meant for novice writers, primarily graduate students whose native language is not English. It is easy to read, avoids jargon, tedious verb tables and lists of prescriptive rules. All the examples are taken from ‘real life’ and the advice is based on Dr. Lewin’s own research. It can be used by the student working independently, or participating in a class.

Most recently, with F. Salager-Meyer, Dr. Lewin has co-edited (2011) Crossed words: Criticism in scholarly writing (Bern: Peter Lang), reflecting her interest in the human side of scholarly writing, which must stride a thin line between promoting and protecting the reputation of the scholar and maintaining polite relations with peers and colleagues.

Dr. Lewin has presented her work at congresses and seminars internationally.