CityReads | 8 Academic Writing Books

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8 Academic Writing Books

These 8 academic writing books encompass the style, format, tools, psychology, behavior, and cognitive science of academic writing.

There are three types of academic writing guide. The first category, the largest of the three, addresses nonfiction style, especially at the level of the paragraph and the sentence, though often including a general ethos of writing as well. The second category focuses on the psychological and working structures that help people write. The third category covers the formal patterns and structure necessary to produce specific academic genres,  such as thesis, dissertation, and journal article. I compile a list of academic writing guide, covering all three categories.

1. Paul J. Silvia,2007. How To Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

How to Write a Lot is about becoming a reflective, disciplined writer. I take a practical, behavior-oriented approach to writing. How to write a lot views writing as a set of concrete behaviors, such as (a) sitting on a chair, bench, stool, ottoman, toilet, or patch of grass and (b) slapping your flippers against the keyboard to generate paragraphs. You can foster these behaviors using simple strategies. Let everyone else procrastinate, daydream, and complain—spend your time sitting down and moving your mittens.

Writing productively is a skill, not a genetic gift, so you can learn how to do it. Writing productively is about actions that aren't doing but could easily do: making a schedule, setting clear goals, keeping track of your work, rewarding yourself, and building good habits. Changing your behavior won't necessarily make writing fun, but it will make writing easier and less oppressive.

2. Eric Hayot, 2014. The elements of academic style: writing for humanities, New York: Columbia University Press.

The title indicates his tribute to the classic writing book, Elements of Style and the goal to become a classic in academic writing. Hayot's book treats writing as a process that encompasses "behavioral, emotional, & institutional parameters."

This book is composed of four parts. The first part of the book, "Writing as Practice," treats writing as a form of life and addresses the contexts and habits of the writer and the institutional contexts. It also offers some strategies for getting writing done. The book's second part, "Strategy," examines large-scale structures that govern the production of scholarship in literary and cultural studies, including introductions, conclusions, structural rhythm, transitions, and so on. The third part, "Tactics," covers lower-level aspects of writing practice: footnotes, figurative language, diction, ventilation, and a variety of other concepts. The final section suggests a way to think about the writing in terms of "becoming": a writer, a written work, a form of life.

3. Umberto Eco, translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina, 2015. How to Write a Thesis, The MIT Press.

Umberto Eco was an Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is the author of The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery, all bestsellers in many languages, as well as a number of influential scholarly works.

By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis—from choosing a topic to organizing a work schedule to writing the final draft. Now in its twenty-third edition in Italy and translated into seventeen languages, How to Write a Thesis has become a classic. Remarkably, this is its first, long overdue publication in English.

How to Write a Thesis is unlike any other writing manual. It reads like a novel. It is opinionated. It is frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious. For example, Eco warned against the dishonesty, "What you should never do is quote from an indirect source pretending that you have read the original. This is not just a matter of professional ethics. Imagine if someone asked how you were able to read a certain manuscript directly, when it is common knowledge that it was destroyed in 1944!" More examples, "First, writing a thesis should be fun. Second, writing a thesis is like cooking a pig: nothing goes to waste".  "Your thesis is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget. In the end, it will represent your first serious and rigorous academic work, and this is no small thing".

4. Pinker, S. 2014. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Viking.

In this entertaining and eminently practical book, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker rethinks the usage guide for the twenty-first century. Using examples of great and gruesome modern prose while avoiding the scolding tone and Spartan tastes of the classic manuals, he shows how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. The Sense of Style is for writers of all kinds, and for readers who are interested in letters and literature and are curious about the ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best.

5. Sönke Ahrens, 2017. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

How to Take Smart Notes builds on the "slip box" technique (Zettelkasten) used by a professor of sociology, Niklas Luhmann, in the late 20th century. It's well known to academics in Germany and in the sociology field, amongst others, but has made little impact beyond those borders. Sönke's book is a detailed explanation of the technique but also builds on the evidence in areas such as education, multi-tasking, ego depletion and willpower, and problems such as confirmation bias. We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains. It's a complete system that can allow anyone to build their own "second brain" in a Zettelkasten to think more deeply and be more productive. Smart notes are not just another way to collect stuff; their aim and goal is to foster and support creative and innovative output.

6. Stephen Bailey, 2018. Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students, 5th Edition

Now in its fifth edition, Academic Writing helps international students succeed in writing essays and reports for their English-language academic courses. Thoroughly revised and updated, it is designed to let teachers and students easily find the topics they need, both in the classroom and for self-study.

The book consists of five parts: The Writing Process; Elements of Writing; Language Issues; Vocabulary for Writing; and Writing Models. The first part explains and practices every stage of essay writing, from choosing the best sources, reading and note-making, through to referencing and proofreading. The four remaining parts, organized alphabetically, can be taught in conjunction with the first part or used on a remedial basis. A progress check at the end of each part allows students to assess their learning. All units are fully cross-referenced, and a complete set of answers to the practice exercises is included.

7. Belcher, Wendy Laura, Writing your journal article in twelve weeks : a guide to academic publishing success，Second edition. Chicago， London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, which takes this overwhelming task and breaks it into small, manageable steps. For the past decade, this guide has been the go-to source for those creating articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields.

8. Helen Sword, 2012. Stylish Academic Writing, Harvard University Press

Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, intellectual creativity thrives best in an atmosphere of experimentation rather than conformity; and even within the constraints of disciplinary norms, most academics enjoy a far wider range of stylistic choices than they realize argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. The agenda is a transformative one: to start a stylistic revolution that will end in improved reading conditions for all. This book showcases the work of academic writers from across the disciplines who stretch and break disciplinary molds— and get away with it. This book encourages readers to adopt whatever stylistic strategies best suit their own skin. Stylish academic writing can be serious, entertaining, straightforward, poetic, unpretentious, ornate, intimate, impersonal, and much in between. What the diverse authors profiled here have in common is a commitment to the ideals of communication, craft, and creativity.

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.

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