The Only Academic Phrasebook You’ll Ever Need: Written and self-published by Luiz Otávio Barros

The Only Academic Book You’ll Ever Need: 600 “sentence frames” + 80 grammar and vocabulary tips, for both native and non-native speakers. Available on Amazon (e-book and paperback). If you live in Brazil and would like to purchase the print version, click here.

Over 25,000 copies sold!

About The Only Academic Phrasebook You’ll Ever Need:

I first felt the need for a book like this back in 1998, when I did my MA in Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University (UK).

Whenever I started a new assignment, I usually knew exactly what I wanted to say and had no trouble organizing my ideas. What I lacked was a wider repertoire of sentences like “A cursory glance at […] reveals that […]” or “[…] is beyond the scope of this paper.” Without that kind of language, I feared I would never truly belong to that kind of discourse community.

So here’s what I used to do: After each and every scientific article I read, I made a list of useful phrases and sentence “templates” that I could include in my own writing. This turned out to be a wise move. When I eventually wrote my dissertation, I was able to use at least 25-30% of the hundreds of sentences I’d compiled.

Fortunately, I never deleted that list.

Back in 2013, as I was purging some old files, I stumbled upon the original Word document and wondered if other people might find my list useful. So I handpicked 70 sentences and turned them into a blog post, which, at the time, I hastily dismissed as a novelty no one would pay attention to. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

To my surprise, those 70 sentences went on to become my most popular post to date, with an average of 700 daily visits. It definitely looked as if I was on to something.

So, one day, I had a crazy idea: What if that blog post became a book?

So, in January 2015, I started compiling a brand new list, which forced me to read hundreds – and I mean literally hundreds- of academic papers beyond the field of Applied Linguistics (my area of expertise). I read lab reports, medical experiments, doctoral theses on urban planning, literature reviews on quantum physics, you name it. By December, I had amassed nearly a thousand sentence frames. But the book was still far from finished, of course.

The next step was to organize those sentences logically, check them for naturalness/frequency against corpus data, trim the list down to 600 items and write language tips that both native and non-native speakers might find useful.

And that was the part that nearly drove me insane. I lost count of the number of times I considered scrapping the whole project, but a little voice inside my head urged me to keep going. And I did.

I don’t know what the future has in store for The Only Academic Phrasebook You’ll Ever Need, but if it can help at least 1,000 people the way my list helped me back in the 1990s, my sleepless nights will have been worth the effort.

EDIT: The book is doing much better than I ever expected. As of November 2020, it has sold over 27,000 copies!