Craft
Some resources to help you tackle revisions, refine your prose style, and think through effective ways to structure material.
Writing Engaging Academic Prose
Letitia Henville: the “Writing Well is Hard” app (which helps you identify writing patterns in your text) and her always-insightful Dr. Editor column
Helen Sword: Stylish Academic Writing; articles on zombie nouns and mutant verbs (NYTimes)
In Stylish Academic Writing, Sword provides specific recommendations for vivid, precise prose (especially in her chapter on “smart sentencing”).
Pamela Haag: Revise: The Scholar-Writer’s Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting Your Manuscript
Haag’s Revise is a terrific new style guide. Haag’s guidelines for writing engaging prose are smart and thorough, and her explanations are approachable.
Rachael Cayley: Thriving as a Graduate Writer
In spite of the title, Cayley’s book has plenty to offer later stage academics as well. Useful advice on a range of micro-level writing issues—including her brilliant advice about “saying less or saying more” (both cutting points and fleshing out points during the revision process in order to demonstrate the significance of all the points that are included).
Joshua Schimel: Writing Science. “It is the author's job to make the reader's job easy" (5).
Schimel gives concrete suggestions for crafting readable science papers. His own eminently readable chapters cover topics such as creating narrative tension, organizing paragraphs strategically, using word order to stress important points, and condensing writing without losing meaning.
Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup: Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
Joseph Williams’s classic Style (revised by Joseph Bizup) carefully explains a set of guidelines for expressing ideas lucidly and elegantly. This is a book I come back to periodically.
Structuring a Paragraph, Structuring a Book
Letitia Henville: “Strategic paragraph structuring”
Rachel Cayley: “Breaking Points” and the paragraph as a unit of discourse
Eric Hayot: The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities
Hayot aims to provide “strategy for the big concepts, tactics for the small ones,” and he delivers, with thoughtful (and sometimes thought-provoking) discussions of stylistic and structural choices that writers can make. Hayot’s book delves into the relationship between the writer’s structural choices and the reader’s experience of the ideas presented.
Katelyn E. Knox and Allison Van Deventer, The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook
Knox and Van Deventer provide a set of extremely useful exercises that help writers articulate their arguments and structure their books.
William Germano: On Revision: The Only Writing that Counts.
Germano offers sage advice for tackling macro-issues during the revision process for an academic book. This book is one of my favorites.
Scott Norton: Developmental Editing
Norton provides some useful suggestions for figuring out how to overhaul your book’s structure in order to foreground your argument. (A caveat, though: this book—written for editors and structured around fictional case studies—can be a bit difficult to follow.)
Fundamentals
Claire Kehrwald Cook: Line By Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing
Copyeditor Claire Kehrwald Cook provides careful explanations of various issues—such as parallel structure, comma usage, and pronoun-antecedent agreement—that commonly trip up writers. If you are actively revising your work and would like to brush up on grammar or punctuation, you might find this book to be a helpful resource.
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein: “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
Graff and Birkenstein introduce rhetorical moves commonly used to advance scholarly argument.
Patricia T. O’Conner: Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English
Written in an engaging style and easy to dip into a bit at a time, this book is my favorite of the (small) sub-genre of “entertaining grammar guides.”