Abstract
‘The work of a professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others’ (Boyer, 1990: 23)
To review a book on stylish academic writing is to be a hostage to fortune: ‘You’ve read it, so show us what you can do.’ I have two responses: first, if my writing were elegant, I would not need to read the book. Second, changing habits is a hard process, as anyone who has given up smoking or changed their golf swing can testify. As a PhD candidate, I have had no training on writing style. Moreover, I often hear academics on PhD panels discussing an ability to write as if it is something beyond our control. However, the sociology department at Berkeley offers a course on sociological writing, and I have heard PhD students in Europe discussing and recommending the The Little Brown Compact Handbook (Aaron, 1995). So, I am looking for clues to boost my academic writing style and sharing this with the readers of the International Small Business Journal.
Normally, books reviewed in this journal are directly relevant to small business researchers. Stylish Academic Writing is being reviewed in this journal because it signals the importance of writing quality. Even though the book says little about business, large or small – indeed, Chris Grey is the only author who writes about managers who appears – many submissions to journals have unstylish academic writing, and in a world where readers guard their time jealously, high on an editor’s wishlist is a boost to the quality of written submissions. Rick Wilson, editor of the Journal of Political Science, says: ‘I hope to change my bad habits and dearly wish those submitting manuscripts would read this book.’ Therefore, Stylish Academic Writing is relevant to small business researchers.
The book is a plea for those academics writing and submitting manuscripts to improve their ability to describe complex ideas in a clear, elegant manner. Helen Sword is Associate Professor in the Centre for Academic Development, University of Auckland. She trained as a literary scholar, which gives her a particularly good background and the expertise to review academic writing. The genesis of the book came from a course on academic writing that she was asked to teach to academics from across disciplines. In developing the course materials she dealt with academic writing from across the disciplines. Her class grappled with ‘serpentine syntax’, ‘gratuitous jargon’ and ‘turgid sentences’ in every discipline’s leading journals. Clear English suffered.
Yet style books distinguish constantly between clear and unclear English. Helen Sword does provide some useful indicators of what is clear and unclear. Clear language uses Plain English, mixes the lengths of sentences, keeping verbs and subjects close to each other. Unclear language utilizes Latinate words, many nominalizations that are vague and the passive tense. For example, clear English discusses a new firm founder’s wants; unclear English discusses the requirements and expectations of those undertaking entrepreneurship. Stylish Academic Writing begins with clarity.
To improve clarity, the book divides into two sections. The first section consists of three chapters that set the scene on style and substance, including whether the academy perpetuates bad writing habits. The second section examines each aspects of stylish academic writing from sentences to narrative and metaphor.
The key part of section 1 are Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 investigates who is to blame for turgid prose, only to reveal that the disciplines themselves did not perpetuate the style of language. Within the book, exemplars of stylish writing come from philosophy to physics and all in between. As I read from page to page, sometimes these examples interrupted rather than enlightened me. Nonetheless, although medical journals build a rigid structure to their articles, scientists use the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’ much more than historians. Overall, the variation in style is greater within the disciplines than between them.
Moving on from the disciplines, Chapter 3 presents a guide to style guides, most useful for those of us with bad habits. It distils the advice given by guides such as Strunk and White (1999) into seven elements: conciseness, clarity, Plain English, precision, mixed sentence length, active verbs and telling a story. Of course, Strunk and White (1999) had presented the basic elements of style already.
What is new perhaps is that Helen Sword presents choices rather than rules. There are chapters on voice, which discusses whether to use the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’, sentences, ‘hooks’, giving examples, the whole story, structure and more creative elements. More rule-bound perhaps, the chapter on smart sentences highlights three key principles. First, use what Sword calls concrete nouns and vivid verbs. Concrete nouns engage your senses: ice cream is a concrete noun with taste, colour and texture; intelligence is an abstract noun, so what colour is intelligence? Second, keep nouns and verbs close together. Third, stylish writers avoid cluttering their sentences with long lists of prepositions, although the sentence length may vary. After all, many short sentences that follow each other quickly become staccato: not stylish at all.
Nonetheless, in the spirit of making choices, every chapter in the second part of the book ends with a list of ‘things to try’. Chapter 11 on structure suggests some fine-tuning by making an outline based on topic sentences. Chapter 5 suggests the reader rates their paragraph for stodgy prose at The Writer’s Diet (www.writersdiet.com). I found this to be useful.
Yet the tension remains between encouraging experimentation, on the one hand, and rules, on the other, as Sword concludes with a rule:
Concrete language is the stylish writer’s magic bullet, a verbal strategy so simple and powerful that I am amazed it is so seldom mentioned in academic writing textbooks … All the stylish academic writers quoted in this book make liberal use of concrete language, whether to hook their readers’ attention, to tell a story, or to explain theoretical concepts. (pp. 173, 174)
Overall, I enjoyed this book and it deserves space on your bookshelf. Stylish Academic Writing differs from the other guides by encouraging the reader to experiment. For example, one might develop a simile into a metaphor, then use it to describe stylishly, like a ‘swarm of new firms’. If one has a good grasp of grammar and clarity, then experimenting with English is fine, but of course, we may be encouraged to run before we can walk. Therefore, I recommend this book as a supplement to other books on style in the academic’s library. Aside from Strunk and White, The Little, Brown Compact Handbook gives greater instruction, particularly for beginner researchers.
Will I try everything mentioned in Stylish Academic Writing? I doubt it. Some more, florid elements such as extended metaphors I will leave for others who are more capable. I think the basics matter most. Nonetheless, Stylish Academic Writing deserves its place on our bookshelf, if only to remind us of the seven key elements of clarity.