Stylish Academic Writing. by Helen Sword (review)

‘The penetration of Marvell’s poetry was at one with its duality of wit, and there is a somber wit in Larkin’s line, wit as most comprehensively defined by T. S. Eliot in speaking of Marvell: ‘It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.’ The dignity of such wit comes from its conceding that the possibilities cannot all be made simultaneously explicit and yet that the magnanimous imagination can grant their existence; the pathos comes from the acknowledgement that we can entertain the thought of such a universal realm but cannot enter the realm itself.’¹

Phillips Larkin’s poetry and prose are personal favourites, and the book Larkin at Sixty, a birthday celebration of the author, has a proud place on my bookshelf. The essays, anecdotes, and poems are a fitting tribute to Larkin, and almost all are readable and entertaining. However, there was one rotten apple in the barrel, written by an academic, as might have been predicted. This is a dense and typical piece of academic writing that seems to display the author’s erudition and surely isn’t intended to be read; it is the one piece in this book that I have never finished. In what should be a party, it is a dirge, not a eulogy. A paragraph from the same, printed above, came back to me as I read Stylish Academic Writing (SAW), which quotes from numerous papers that are at least as unappetizing to the reader as my chosen example. Helen Sword may be stating the obvious that ‘there is a massive gap between what most readers consider to be good writing and what academics typically produce and publish’ (3). Any academic knows this; what Sword has done is not just diagnose the illness but find ways whereby a repentant patient can effect a cure.

Part 1, ‘Style and Substance,’ is divided into three short chapters. ‘Rules of Engagement’ (chapter 1) identifies, bluntly and succinctly, the way many, perhaps even most, academics write. Words like ‘turgid,’ ‘dismal,’ ‘abstract,’ and ‘convoluted,’ and the phrase ‘not write clearly and concisely’ make Sword’s position clear in just one paragraph on page 5. She asks, the way we all do at times, whether some of the truly dismal writing by academics is actually read by anyone. ‘Pick up a peer-reviewed journal in just about any academic discipline and what will you find? Impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles’ (3) that are typically advocated in any book on effective academic writing. Is that why I favour journals that allow me to spread my wings and write in a more conversational manner, like Geology Today and (dare I say it) Journal of Scholarly Publishing ? My research papers need to be packed with data and interpretations, the standard fodder for the peer-reviewed journals in most fields. But there are other places where I publish for fun, for the joy it gives me to communicate with a wider audience. How many academics do that? How many academics even try to do that?

Sword’s opinions, ideas, and conclusions are backed up and based on a solid database that she manipulates and massages with dexterity (chapter 2 and appendix). This resource is derived from one thousand peer-reviewed papers in sixty-six research journals spread cross ten disciplines (14), from medicine and computer science to law, from evolutionary studies and anthropology to literary studies. This analysis forms the basis of most of SAW. Sword’s claim that ‘the signature research styles of our disciplines influence and define us, but they need not crush and confine us’ (22) may or may not be true — too many authors are crushed and confined before they leave graduate school. It is interesting to note the broad patterns apparent in Figures 2.1 and 2.2 (17, 21). For example, papers in...