Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write by Helen Sword (review)

Helen Sword dances while she writes. This revelation comes near the end of Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, a work filled with confessions and reflections from an enviable assembly of academic writers across four continents. Sword's latest contribution to the corpus of writing about academic writing—following Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard, 2012) and The Writer's Diet (Chicago, 2016)—demonstrates that when writers dance, readers join the jamboree, leaving the encounter uplifted, energized, invigorated, joyous.

From interviews with 100 academic writers and over 1200 responses to an anonymous questionnaire about academic writing, Sword has distilled four writerly 'habits' that manifest themselves in our writing lives, affecting attitudes, practices, and output. These she identifies in the introduction as behavioural, artisanal, social, and emotional; she presents them as four cornerstones—the base—of an individual's 'house of writing.'¹ Readers are invited to complete a straightforward diagnostic exercise that allows them to 'map' their base profiles along a simple radar chart (that is, to plot and then connect the four elements along a cruciform continuum, from 'weak,' near the intersection, to 'strong,' at the extremes), with a goal of identifying strengths and areas for 'home improvement.' Those who visit the accompanying website to complete the exercise online are rewarded by the clever names Sword associates with the sixteen possible quadrilaterals, ranging from 'the spinnaker' and 'the stingray' to 'the hang glider' and 'the bullet train.'² (I happen to be 'the lone wolf,' relatively strong in behavioural, artisanal, and emotional habits but weaker in social.) Since the goal is balance across the habits, thus maximizing air and light and time and space within one's house of writing, the subjective exercise is neither prescriptive nor judgmental. That lack of prescription and judgment, in fact, contributes toward Sword's goal of liberating her readers from the sense of chastisement and despair that frequently permeates books on writing. Nowhere in this book does Sword imply that readers must do things a certain way to become successful academic writers. On the contrary: She shares plentiful empirical evidence to dispel any one-size-fits-all myths regarding productivity—defining 'productive' (and 'successful') quite capaciously in the process.

How fitting that Sword embraces an architectural metaphor for the base habits! Palladian in its balance and symmetry, Sword's book exudes the meticulous craft and care behind its composition. The contents page is worthy of framing—in the vein that those living in bespoke or historical houses might mount blueprints or artist's renderings. It displays the perfect balance of the work: four parts—one for each of the base habits—each opened by a five-page introduction and followed by three chapters of proportionate length (averaging thirteen pages apiece). Each chapter considers one key subtheme of the featured base habit, presents compelling voices of Sword's interviewees, ends with actionable lists of 'things to try,' and contains precisely three one-page profiles of academic writers interviewed for the work. These profiles introduce various metaphors for writing, patterning a motif that Sword fully addresses in the final chapter. The book's preface is balanced by an afterword; the introduction by a conclusion. The back matter (methodological appendix, notes, bibliography, acknowledgements, and index) resides in an orderly guest house, unobtrusive yet easily accessible. No ornament or detail seems out of place. I can't remember the last time I encountered such a gloriously logical organization.³

The balanced structure allows readers to enter and thus engage with the text through whichever base component they wish. After touring the appendix, I read sequentially and was richly rewarded. Sword's three chapters on behavioural habits cover time, place, and rituals; she demonstrates, through copious examples, that there is no 'right' time, place, or way to write. To Sword's surprise, roughly seven-eighths of her informants do not 'write every day': productivity...