Coherence is such an essential aspect of writing that 100% of judges agreed an essay was well written, based exclusively on it including a thesis sentence. However, coherence also holds the key to ensuring readers interpret your evidence precisely as you want them to. Moreover, coherence relies on essential features of our memories, specifically priming, primacy, and recency effects. Writers can harness the power of priming and primacy by introducing overviews of a paragraph’s main point in the first three sentences. And they can leverage the power of titles to provide readers with the context they so desperately need, regardless of what they read.

The focus of this chapter is on how language policies are resisted. The chapter begins by articulating in a theoretical and practical way what resistance to language policy looks like, particularly from a discursive point of view. It concludes with a case study of resistance to language policy in an online forum for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, highlighting the entanglements between resistance to limits on what ‘named languages’ could be used and a broader struggle to overcome a hegemonic racial ideology around the concept of ‘native speaker’.

In this chapter, language policies are examined with reference to how they are debated in public discourse. The chapter argues that, like in politics, the space afforded to language policy in conventional media is often narrow, and depends upon how language-related issues invoke broader narratives of identity and ideology, though more significant debating often occurs in new media. The case study examines debates about language policy in Singapore, drawing on examples from traditional media (in the form of letters to the editor) to comments under a Facebook post by a local media outlet.

The concluding chapter brings together the main threads running through the book in a discussion of what acting critically looks like from the perspective of language policy scholarship. It discusses how we as language policy scholars can engage in policy action, not only through scholarship but through advocacy in public discourse and by seeking out opportunities to achieve tangible, practical change.

Most of us find the prospect of writing anything other than a text or email slightly less appealing than a root canal, which at least gives you time off school or work. However, if you procrastinate for too long, you can turn what ought to be an unchallenging jog into the equivalent of a marathon. No weekend jogger can tackle a marathon without keeling over, probably somewhere around mile 12. And writers, even the seasoned ones who write for a living, can seldom afford to procrastinate for more than a few days. You might think that your 25-page term paper is fine, despite being cranked out overnight on a combination of caffeine and panic. But anyone who reads it will recognize the signs of a writer hard up against a deadline, hurling sentences on the page. Your readers will wince their way through every paragraph.

I once regularly performed a party trick for my students. After they sent me a one-page assignment, I would tell them what they regularly read. “You read The Economist and The Wall Street Journal compulsively, cover to cover, every day,” I told a commercial banker, who was astonished, like I’d just accurately guessed his maternal grandmother’s maiden name. “The last time you read a book was in tenth grade,” I told a student finishing an MS in Entrepreneurship, who did a double-take before he confessed, “How’d you know?”

The introductory chapter breaks down the main features of what a focus on language policy in action entails. I discuss what recent reconceptualisations of ‘language’ mean for how we understand language policy, arguing in particular for a need to focus on how the exercise of authority in language alters the balance of power in discourse. Language policy is presented as a form of sociocultural practice and broken down into five broad actions: constructing, debating, interpreting, enforcing, resisting. The foundations of the critical approach of the book are also presented.

What makes a good research topic? Clearly, you need a topic in the sweet spot for research, where you can easily find studies and even books on it, without the topic being so common or popular that your readers will experience profound déjà vu with the first paragraph. Yet some other factors determine which research will lodge stubbornly in our memories. In fact, some research can excite professors who believe they’ve seen everything and even draw the attention of news media. These factors include the usual suspects that distinguish stories in the news from the stories destined to languish in obscurity: currency, relevance, and novelty. But the last item, novelty, is the one that shapes our recall more powerfully than any of the other nine features of newsworthiness. In fact, when you harness novelty to uncertainty, you elicit the greatest interest and most intense recall. If you wonder how to pull off this trick of combining novelty and uncertainty, the answer is both simple and surprisingly common, if you know what to look for. Harness the power of paradox – a statement with a conclusion the opposite of what the audience expects – and you make research into something both memorable and attention-grabbing. Moreover, once you know how paradox works, you’ll spot it at work in virtually every news story that crosses over from the dry realms of research and into mainstream news media and national conversations.