by Kristin Huggins, Consultant
“Academic writing, like university teaching, is what sociologist Paul Trowler calls a ‘recurrent practice,’ one of the many routine tasks that most academics perform ‘habitually and in an unconsidered way,” with little thought as to how or why things might be done differently.” – Helen Sword (2012, p. 23)
This book is a culmination of several years of research on the conventions of academic writing, how academics feel about the writing process, and how students and early-career academics believe that academic writing must fit in a particular box to achieve any measure of professional success. Helen Sword is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Comparative Literature and has taught in higher education for several decades. By all accounts, her prestigious credentials certainly lend themselves to a traditional academic, yet her life’s work has been in the pursuit of breaking down barriers for writers who seek to infuse their academic work with elements of humanism outside of the conventional norms.
Upon first read-through, Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing feels like a response to Strunk and White’s highly acclaimed Elements of Style, a quintessential text on traditional academic prose in the English language. Several chapters address topics similar to Strunk and White, such as structure and syntax, that are presented in new and innovative ways, pulled from Sword’s research on interdisciplinary writing components. Ever the professor, Sword’s chapters always conclude with “Things to Try,” offering the reader helpful ways to incorporate the chapter’s suggestions into their own practice. Examples include the following:
In the chapter Structural Designs: “Make an outline of your article or book based only on its chapter titles or section headings. How well does that outline, on its own, communicate what your work is about? Are you using section headings to inform, engage, or direct your readers, or merely to carve up space?” (p. 133)
In the chapter Jargonitis: “Ask yourself hard questions about your motivations. Do you employ jargon to impress others, play with language and ideas, create new knowledge, signal your membership in a disciplinary community, or communicate succinctly with colleagues? Retain only those jargon words that clearly serve your priorities and values.” (p. 121)
I found several suggestions particularly helpful as a Writing Consultant who works with clients in multiple disciplinary fields each week. I often feel like I’m a polyglot of academia – speaking several languages and trying my best to translate them into the same dialect of academic writing. During my first read-through, I found myself highlighting prompts and leading questions to retain for consultation use with clients. Some items also convicted me to discover blind spots in my own research.
Sword also strikes out against the “conventional” use of the word “style,” commonly understood in academia as the style guides assigned to respective disciplines. Instead, Sword argues that academics must strive to become “stylish academic writers” (p. 9), a persona embodied by the idea of actively pursuing engagement with an audience, clear communication of ideas with concise examples, and observation of interdisciplinary writing methods that might lend a humanistic quality to our work.
Three primary characteristics of a Stylish Academic Writer emerge from Sword’s work: Connection, Craft, and Creativity.
Connection – What I love most about this book was Sword’s persistence in reestablishing our purpose for producing academic work: to tell a story. Your research, dear reader, began as a response to a problem, a gap, a question about the world around us. Research seeks to connect, to create meaning out of the unknown. These are valuable stories, and Sword argues that no matter the discipline or style guide we must keep those stories and their meanings at the forefront of our writing process.
Craft – Sword encourages readers to find pleasure in the craft of writing. The word “craft” encompasses the broader concept of writing (i.e., drafting, editing, revising, finalizing), and the smaller concepts (i.e., sentence-level constructions). She provides the following example below for the smaller concept of craft:
“A carefully crafted sentence welcomes its reader like a comfortable rocking chair, bears its reader across chasms like a suspension bridge… A poorly crafted or uncrafted sentence, on the other hand, functions more like a shapeless log tossed into a river: it might or might not help you get to the other side, depending on how strong the current is and how hard you are willing to kick.” (p. 48)
Creativity – “Numerous studies have documented the crucial role of lateral thinking in the creative process: that is, the ability of pathbreaking researchers to’ think sideways’ rather than always plodding forward in a straight conceptual trajectory.” (p. 169)
Sword takes the idea of creativity in academic writing and dissects it into three components: passion, elegance, and interdisciplinary exploration. She cautions readers not to mistake creativity as a call for writers to adopt creative writing practices. Instead, writers should be willing to explore writing strategies found in outside disciplines, especially those that promote clarity, conciseness, concrete communication, and eloquence.
Citation: Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard University Press, 2012.