Pat Thomson is Professor of Education, School of Education, The University of Nottingham, UK. She maintains an academic writing and research blog Patter which now has some 35,000 followers around the world: her Twitter account has 23,000. She regularly runs writing workshops in the UK, Australia, Iceland and Norway, has taught writing in South Africa, Canada, USA, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Denmark and run workshops for several EU doctoral networks and conferences.