Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
What distinguishes good writing from bad writing? How can people transform their writing to make it more powerful and more effective? Are universities teaching students how to become better writers? In order to answer these questions and others, we sat down with Geoffrey Huck, an associate professor of the Professional Writing Program at York University.
What was happening in the world last year? Events such as the the devastating protest-turned-conflict in Ukraine, or the maritime disputes between states in the South China Sea, have wide-reaching repercussions – from the amount a country spends on its military, to the direction of foreign policies whole regions take.
For over two centuries, newspapers were the dominant news medium. Yet today “dead tree” media-like stamp collecting is, well, so twentieth century. Now that millions of Americans get their news from social media on-line, newspapers have been in free-fall, prompting many pundits to wonder aloud if journalism has a future.
According to philosophical lore many sentences are self-evident. A self-evident sentence wears its semantic status on its sleeve: a self-evident truth is a true sentence whose truth strikes us immediately, without the need for any argument or evidence, once we understand what the sentence means.
What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week (8-14 November 2015) and Academic Book Week (9-16 November) with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Today, we present Oxford’s list of ten academic books that changed the world.
Psychologist Stephen P. Hinshaw, along with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author Katherine Ellison, authors of ADHD: What Everyone Needs to Know, answered a few questions for us in hopes of decluttering some information about ADHD.
The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a natural genius who had no need of art or reading. That tradition grew from origins which should make us suspect it. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson famously declared that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’.
But what’s the right term, really? After all, much of the political disagreement and legal wrangling over this issue is rooted in this fundamental conceptual question, is “physician-assisted suicide” really suicide? Let’s see if we can figure it out.
Listen closely and you’ll hear the squeak of sneakers on AstroTurf, the crack of a batter’s first hit, and the shrill sound of whistles signaling Game on! Yes, it’s that time of year again.
At the dawn of the children’s hospital movement in Europe and the West (best epitomised and exemplified by the opening of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (GOSH) on 14 February 1852), the plight of sick children was precarious at all levels of society. After a long campaign by Dr Charles West, Great Ormond Street hospital was the first establishment to provide in-patient beds specifically for children in England.
Mormon feminism may seem to some a recent phenomenon, but events and writings in the history of Mormon feminism date back to the early 1970s. Here we have compiled these key moments in when Mormon women have engaged with question about gender in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a timeline of the pre-history and history of the Mormon feminist movement.
The following extract is excerpted from Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City. The chapter, titled ‘Learning to Leisure’ traces the leisure lives of a group of young men from Langview, a deindustrialised working-class community in Glasgow.
The study of consciousness has long been excluded from serious consideration within psychology and the neurosciences, but this field is gaining momentum again. We sat down with the editor of Neuroscience of Consciousness, Anil Seth, to learn a bit more about our “inner universe” – a landscape sometimes thought of as a problem beyond the reach of science.
Thank you to those of you who participated in the voting period for our Place of the Year 2015 longlist. The top five contenders have moved on to the next round into our shortlist, and we need your help again. If you’re interested about each place and why each has been nominated for Place of the Year 2015, read back on our previous blog post. Vote for your pick in this year’s shortlist by 30 November. The Place of the Year 2015 will be announced 3 December.
For more than forty years now, the Religious Right has been a powerful force in the United States, helping reshape the Republican Party and realign the nation’s politics and culture.
It is hard to quantify the impact of ‘role-model’ celebrities on the acceptance and uptake of genetic testing and bio-literacy, but it is surely significant. Angelina Jolie is an Oscar-winning actress, Brad Pitt’s other half, mother, humanitarian, and now a “DNA celebrity”. She propelled the topic of familial breast cancer, female prophylactic surgery, and DNA testing to the fore.