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by Michael Barlow (Author)
Most academic writing guides tell you what good writing should look like. This book shows you what published business researchers actually do.
Drawing on a purpose-built corpus of 136 peer-reviewed business research articles (over 1,160,000 words) Writing the Business Research Article reveals the patterns, conventions, and rhetorical strategies that characterize successful writing in the discipline. Every frequency count, every pattern, and every example sentence comes directly from published work.
The book is organized in thirteen units across three levels. Units 1-4 address paper architecture and framing: the overall structure of a business paper, the Introduction, the Discussion, and the Conclusion and Abstract. Units 5-8 cover the body sections: the Literature Review and Theoretical Framework, Hypotheses and Propositions, Methodology and Research Design, and Results and Findings. Units 9-13 examine cross-paper features that shift from section to section: hedging and boosting, tense and voice, citation practices, connectives and argumentation, and the rhetorical work of first and last sentences. A final unit synthesizes all previous analyses to show how the entire paper serves a single macro-argument.
What makes this book different is its evidence base. Rather than prescribing rules or offering model paragraphs to imitate, it uses corpus analysis to work from the bottom up: examining what hundreds of published writers actually chose to do when facing the rhetorical challenges of business research writing. The result replaces intuition with frequency. You learn, for example, that 98% of introductions open with the world rather than a reference to the paper; that 90% use explicit contribution language; that Discussion sections appear in 58% of articles, and that business papers follow not one but five distinct ending structures. These are not rules; they are the accumulated choices of successful writers, made visible so you can make informed decisions about your own writing.
The book is designed for two uses: as a guide during initial drafting and as a diagnostic tool during revision. Each unit includes a conceptualization stage: questions to answer before you consult the corpus evidence, followed by detailed analysis of conventions, corpus frequencies, example sentences, and a revision checklist. A structured five-step revision workflow helps writers systematically check their manuscript from macro-structure down to sentence-level features.
Written for students writing their first business research paper, researchers moving into business from other disciplines, and second language learners looking to sharpen their writing, this book offers something no prescriptive guide can: a clear, data-driven picture of how business research articles actually work.
