Sword has produced a sleek and, yes, nicely written guide based on the principle that ‘elegant ideas deserve elegant expression.’ Aiming to be useful to writers in almost any discipline, Sword defines stylish academic writing in the broadest terms.
-- Jennifer Howard Times Literary Supplement
[Sword’s] counsel is wise, efficiently written, and infectiously winsome. She advises academic writers to use anecdotes and carefully chosen metaphors, and to write opening sentences that encourage readers to keep reading. She has drawn from a massive array of academic articles (more than a thousand) and given particular attention to authors known for writing readable material… Helen Sword’s book contains much wisdom… Stylish Academic Writing contains superb counsel for academics who want to write with greater clarity and skill.
-- Barton Swaim Weekly Standard
Stylish Academic Writing offers pithy, thoughtful, and concrete guidance on ways to improve writing about scholarly research (or anything else for that matter) so that it is engaging to others… Teachers of writing at the college level will want to read the book so as to help stem the tide of overly formal, dry-as-dust term papers that are still standard fare in many classes.
-- Dana S. Dunn Psychology Today
Helen Sword’s brilliant little volume is in many respects the ideal companion to Stephen J. Pyne’s equally brilliant Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Non-Fiction (Harvard) and equally deserving of a wider audience than its target group, which in this case comprises those academics who either write or have to put up with ‘impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose.’ As Sword writes: ‘Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression.’ Featuring oodles of ideas and tips backed up by lashings of original research and bursting to the seams with case studies exemplifying the good, the bad and the ugly of academic writing (‘via a symbolic interactionist lens’ is one such monster), this is a must for writers in any discipline.
-- William Yeoman West Australian
[A] practical and useful book.
-- Colin Steele Australian Book Review
Surely it’s time to declare war on terms such as postsemioticist, flip-flop gates and feature theory, terms Orwell would surely have included under his definition of obscurity as a cuttlefish defensively spurting out ink. Anyway, let’s hope this excellent new book is a sign that things are about to change.
-- Bradley Winterton Taipei Times
Stylish Academic Writing challenges academics to make their work more consequential by communicating more clearly—and provides helpful hints and models for doing so. This is a well-crafted and valuable contribution that combines substance with style.
-- Arne L. Kalleberg, Editor, Social Forces
As an academic—staff or student—wouldn’t you like people to enjoy reading your work? In Stylish Academic Writing, Helen Sword offers dozens of suggestions as to how you might improve your work, get your argument across in a more appealing manner, and attract more readers. We can all learn something useful from this book, and it won’t involve a lot of effort.
-- Malcolm Tight, Editor, Studies in Higher Education
Occasionally the tedium of reading an unending supply of poorly written manuscripts is upended by a cogent, well-written, piece. Helen Sword details why this is so prevalent and offers sage advice to beginning—and even senior—researchers on how to avoid dulling academic prose. I take her advice to heart. I hope to change my numerous bad habits and I dearly wish those submitting manuscripts would read this book.
-- Rick K. Wilson, Editor, American Journal of Political Science
It’s a weird and complicated experience, picking up a book that covers familiar territory and realizing it’s better than what you might have written. That was the case when I first read Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing.
-- Rachel Toor Chronicle of Higher Education
Stylish Academic Writing
Narrated by Virginia Woolf
Helen SwordUnabridged — 6 hours, 24 minutes
Stylish Academic Writing
Narrated by Virginia Woolf
Helen SwordUnabridged — 6 hours, 24 minutes
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Overview
Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword's analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce.
Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.
Editorial Reviews
Stylish Academic Writing offers pithy, thoughtful, and concrete guidance on ways to improve writing about scholarly research (or anything else for that matter) so that it is engaging to others… Teachers of writing at the college level will want to read the book so as to help stem the tide of overly formal, dry-as-dust term papers that are still standard fare in many classes.
As an academic—staff or student—wouldn’t you like people to enjoy reading your work? In Stylish Academic Writing, Helen Sword offers dozens of suggestions as to how you might improve your work, get your argument across in a more appealing manner, and attract more readers. We can all learn something useful from this book, and it won’t involve a lot of effort.
Surely it’s time to declare war on terms such as postsemioticist, flip-flop gates and feature theory, terms Orwell would surely have included under his definition of obscurity as a cuttlefish defensively spurting out ink. Anyway, let’s hope this excellent new book is a sign that things are about to change.
Helen Sword’s brilliant little volume is in many respects the ideal companion to Stephen J. Pyne’s equally brilliant Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Non-Fiction (Harvard) and equally deserving of a wider audience than its target group, which in this case comprises those academics who either write or have to put up with ‘impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose.’ As Sword writes: ‘Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression.’ Featuring oodles of ideas and tips backed up by lashings of original research and bursting to the seams with case studies exemplifying the good, the bad and the ugly of academic writing (‘via a symbolic interactionist lens’ is one such monster), this is a must for writers in any discipline.
[Sword’s] counsel is wise, efficiently written, and infectiously winsome. She advises academic writers to use anecdotes and carefully chosen metaphors, and to write opening sentences that encourage readers to keep reading. She has drawn from a massive array of academic articles (more than a thousand) and given particular attention to authors known for writing readable material… Helen Sword’s book contains much wisdom… Stylish Academic Writing contains superb counsel for academics who want to write with greater clarity and skill.
Occasionally the tedium of reading an unending supply of poorly written manuscripts is upended by a cogent, well-written, piece. Helen Sword details why this is so prevalent and offers sage advice to beginning—and even senior—researchers on how to avoid dulling academic prose. I take her advice to heart. I hope to change my numerous bad habits and I dearly wish those submitting manuscripts would read this book.
[A] practical and useful book.
Stylish Academic Writing challenges academics to make their work more consequential by communicating more clearly—and provides helpful hints and models for doing so. This is a well-crafted and valuable contribution that combines substance with style.
Sword has produced a sleek and, yes, nicely written guide based on the principle that ‘elegant ideas deserve elegant expression.’ Aiming to be useful to writers in almost any discipline, Sword defines stylish academic writing in the broadest terms.
It’s a weird and complicated experience, picking up a book that covers familiar territory and realizing it’s better than what you might have written. That was the case when I first read Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing.
[A] practical and useful book.
— Colin Steele
[Sword's] counsel is wise, efficiently written, and infectiously winsome. She advises academic writers to use anecdotes and carefully chosen metaphors, and to write opening sentences that encourage readers to keep reading. She has drawn from a massive array of academic articles (more than a thousand) and given particular attention to authors known for writing readable material...Helen Sword's book contains much wisdom...Stylish Academic Writing contains superb counsel for academics who want to write with greater clarity and skill.
— Barton Swaim
Helen Sword's brilliant little volume is in many respects the ideal companion to Stephen J. Pyne's equally brilliant Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Non-Fiction (Harvard) and equally deserving of a wider audience than its target group, which in this case comprises those academics who either write or have to put up with "impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose." As Sword writes: "Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression." Featuring oodles of ideas and tips backed up by lashings of original research and bursting to the seams with case studies exemplifying the good, the bad and the ugly of academic writing ("via a symbolic interactionist lens" is one such monster), this is a must for writers in any discipline.
— William Yeoman
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170927869 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 08/14/2018 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 931,545 |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 7: Hooks and Sinkers
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
If the drug trip described in the opening lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had transported Hunter S. Thompson beyond the California desert to the even more bizarre and alien landscape of academe, his account might instead be titled “Hallucinogen-induced anxiety disorders and revulsion responses in a Southwestern gambling-oriented locality: A qualitative study,” and the first few sentences would read something like this:
[Medicine] It has been suggested that frontal brain asymmetry (FBA) is associated with differences in fundamental dimensions of emotion (Davidson, 2002). According to the directional model of negative affect, the left prefrontal cortex is associated with the approach-related emotion, anger, whereas the right prefrontal area is associated with the withdrawal-related emotion, anxiety.
Of course, we all know that scientific researchers are supposed to be concerned with serious, sober matters such as frontal brain asymmetry, not with drug-fuelled road trips and hallucinated bats. (The actual title of the article quoted above, by the way, is “Anticipatory anxiety-induced changes in human lateral prefrontal cortex activity”). All the same, academics who care about good writing could do worse than to study the opening moves of novelists and journalists, who generally know a thing or two about how to capture an audience’s attention.
Not every engaging academic book, article, or chapter begins with an opening hook, but a striking number of them do. Stylish writers understand that if you are still reading three pages later, they have probably got you for the long haul. By contrast, nothing sinks a piece of prose more efficiently than a leaden first paragraph. In the sciences and social sciences, researchers frequently follow a four-step rhetorical sequence identified by John Swales as “Creating a Research Space,” or CARS:
• Move 1: Establish that your particular area of research has some significance.
• Move 2: Selectively summarize the relevant previous research.
• Move 3: Show that the reported research is not complete.
• Move 4: Turn the gap into the research space for the present article.
Videos
