ABSTRACT
C. Wright Mills’ (1999) axiom of the importance of the imagination to the practices of social science has something helpful to offer to those interested in academic publishing. Mills argued that social sciences requires its practitioners to shift perspectives — from the personal and individualised to the social and historical, from isolated events to those that are connected and contextualised. This move — from one way of seeing things to another — is precisely what needs to happen in the case of academic writing. Writing with the intention of producing knowledge is a process of sense-making. It is not mechanical. One does not simply take a set of findings, or synthesised literatures, and then report. The scholar needs to imagine how the data that they have analysed can be transformed into a persuasive text; they need to imagine themselves not just as an academic colleague in a local setting, but as someone who communicates with unseen and distant peers; they need to see their individual work as part of a broader scholarly endeavour.
