Stylish Academic Writing, Helen Sword
Stylish Academic Writing, Helen Sword
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Stylish Academic Writing

Author: Helen Sword

Narrator: Virginia Wolf

Unabridged: 6 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/14/2018


Synopsis

Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read—and to write.

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.

About Helen Sword

Helen Sword is professor and director of the Center for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Craig

On the one hand, a lot of this is nothing new. The book encourages writers to peek over the disciplinary fences and draw from what scholars are doing in other fields. It tells its readers that their academic work can be both complex and also clear and concrete. It grants permission to use the person......more

Goodreads review by Tara

What a truly remarkable book. Further, this is is an incredibly courageous book. Any academic - every academic - will think differently about scholarly writing at the conclusion of this book. Importantly, assumptions are not allowed to stand. Analyses of refereed journal articles in a great diversity......more

E. F. Schumacher once wrote that any intelligent fool could make things bigger and more complex, but that it took a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing displays just the genius necessary to inspire academics to get up their c......more