An academic’s guide to writing well

Really struck by one of the opening sentences of your introduction: "Then I look at it and say it aloud, to see if it sings." I explore the music/words connection in 'How Writing Works: From the invention of the alphabet to the rise of social media.' I wish I could write like you though!

Whatever the audience you are writing for, try reading what you have written aloud. If you run out of breath the sentence is too long! If you were explaining whatever you have to say to an intelligent non-specialist in that area, how would you go about it? Aim for that kind of lucidity, especially in introductions and conclusions.

I refer you to my THE article "Clunky writing is proof positive of lazy thinking", published June 2 2006. You can find it with Search (the magnifying glass icon at the top of the page). The social aspect of bad academic writing is discussed in D.G.Myers's "Bad Writing", published in 1999. It can be found on the internet.

Helpful article in terms of what NOT to do, although written with its own linguistic, slightly impassable jargon for the non English scholar. It would be great to see some examples of what GOOD writing looks like, rather than just what not to do.

Regarding point #10, it is reviewers who are likely to try to pick holes in what we have to say, and because of whom the connectives (point #9) are required. It would be lovely to assume that reviewers would stop to think about how two ideas are related, but experiences teaches that it is safer to spell it out. Often, reviewers will preface a request with a remark to the effect of "I understood what you were saying, but it might be clearer to others if...".

While discussing my chapter on Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic my supervisor asked if I had a girlfriend. I told him I did, to which he asked, "Would she understand this?" "Of course not", I proudly replied. So, he set me a challenge: write about Hegel in a way that my girlfriend would know what I was going on about. Back at my desk it became clear how lazy and conceited I had been until then. I had believed that if my writing was unintelligible, then I must be really clever. And the more unintelligible it was, the more clever I must be. But I found out that intelligibility requires so much more hard work and cleverness than unintelligibility requires. My question to myself is now this: am I clever enough, do I understand my subject well enough, am I prepared to make the effort, to write about it in a way that my ex-girlfriend would understand?