Words, ideas, and optimal knowledge-building: A ‘foolproof’ self-help guide to academic (and other) thinking, writing, and problem-solving (21st ... building for future global sustainability)

This book offers a general antidote to the related challenges of critical thinking and problem-solving inquiry in the 21st Century - especially those of producing effective and original academic writing and knowledge. Such issues also link to the particular challenges of generative AI writing agents for university higher education as well as academic scholarship and publishing (i.e. their use to write academic assignments, papers, and dissertations). The ‘foolproof approach’ outlined in this book was developed around a simple but effective ‘emergent method of academic writing’ – a method promoting more effective linking together of ‘words and ideas’ (i.e. thought and language-use) through some relevant focus question or problem and a related ‘thread of inquiry’. Such methods can be helpful to all university students. But it is especially applicable to ‘research-based academic writing’ – and those who struggle with this like postgrad researchers and early career academics. The emergent method of writing is developed here into a ‘foolproof approach to optimal knowledge building’ best exemplified by its use to effectively address the ‘four ways and stages in which many lose their way’ (e.g. ‘the lost PhD’ as well as the large drop-out rate of PhD students that many universities prefer you not know about). Another pivotal key to the optimal knowledge-building use of the emergent method is that it promotes the kind of ‘deep learning’ ability to understand, to develop, and to transfer knowledge as a related process of generating ‘ideas in our own words’. The book includes relevant essays by the author applying this model – as well as practical examples and insights from decades of working with postgrads and others to assist them to achieve more effective writing, inquiry, and thinking outcomes. Along with suggestions for defending the purposes of universities and higher education, all this provides a blueprint for anyone to achieve the kind of ‘mastery of knowledge’ (and related language-use purposes) deserving of authentic recognition – including an actual PhD degree.

1. Introduction: The 21st Century ‘publish or perish’ challenge to human knowledge?
Part A. Words, ideas, and optimal-knowledge-building
2. Words, ideas, and optimal-knowledge-building as ‘deep learning’: Elements of an emerging ‘foolproof approach’ to academic writing and research (etc.)
Part B. A ‘foolproof self-help guide’ to remedying the four ways and stages in which inexperienced academic researchers and (other) writers so often ‘get lost’
3. The ‘lost PhD’: The related four key ways and stages that postgraduates (and others) ‘get lost’ in the research-based academic writing process
4. The relevance of the emergent method of academic writing for knowledge-building
5. The foolproof approach to research-based academic writing as an antidote for the key symptoms of a ‘lost PhD’
Part C. Related essays
6. Towards a more sustainable model of academic knowledge building linked to organizational change in higher education
7. Re-framing ‘Academic English’: The teaching and learning of academic writing in ESL and intercultural as well as native speaker contexts?]
8. The still important role of the ‘humanities’(also) in the future Asian Pacific university
9. Sustainable 21st Century policy building: Innovative design and learning solutions to policy research challenges
10. Higher education ‘marketisation, privatisation, and internationalisation’: Singaporean vs. Malaysian models of the Asian higher education hub policy?
Part D. Example of a PhD design using the ‘foolproof’ approach and related emergent methods
11. The challenge of refining WTO e-commerce policies to be more relevant to emerging economies (a ‘supervisory collaboration’
12. ‘Optimal grounded theory’? Words, ideas, and optimal policy building as an adaptation of grounded theory

Cameron Richards is a semi-retired Australian professor of interdisciplinary studies with extensive experience in the Asia-Pacific region - including at QUT, Nanyang Uni. Singapore, Hong Kong Institute of Education, University of Western Australia, UTM in Malaysia and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. He has a multi-disciplinary background for a current/future focus on sustainability studies, policy research, academic research and writing methodology, leadership and organizational learning, lifelong education, intercultural communication, curriculum innovation, and new literacies. However, in his semi-retirement his other main interest (besides 'community advocacy' and 'seniors lifelong learning') has been family history and related genealogical research and writing (e.g. his 2025 book "Prosperous: The Kennedy Murrays and the origins of historic Evandale in early Colonial Australia". For the last few decades his writings and related 'thinking' (since 1999) have generally subscribed to the projection notion of a '21st Century knowledge-building' model - a model recognising the transformative 'deep learning' process by which all knowledge can and should be generated as reflective and problem-solving inquiry grounded in human experience. In this way, he has planned a book series titled 21st Century knowledge building for future global sustainability. This book is the second book out in this series. Cameron Richards is a semi-retired Australian professor of interdisciplinary studies with extensive experience in the Asia-Pacific region - including at QUT, Nanyang Uni. Singapore, Hong Kong Institute of Education, University of Western Australia, UTM in Malaysia and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. He has a multi-disciplinary background for a current/future focus on sustainability studies, policy research, academic research and writing methodology, leadership and organizational learning, lifelong education, intercultural communication, curriculum innovation, and new literacies. However, in his semi-retirement his other main interest (besides 'community advocacy' and 'seniors lifelong learning') has been family history and related genealogical research and writing (e.g. his 2025 book "Prosperous: The Kennedy Murrays and the origins of historic Evandale in early Colonial Australia". For the last few decades his writings and related 'thinking' (since 1999) have generally subscribed to the projection notion of a '21st Century knowledge-building' model - a model recognising the transformative 'deep learning' process by which all knowledge can and should be generated as reflective and problem-solving inquiry grounded in human experience. In this way, he has planned a book series titled 21st Century knowledge building for future global sustainability". This book is the second book out in this series.