If you aren’t reading, you have no business writing
There is a piece of writing advice so obvious that almost no one follows it: Read.
Not read in the way academics read, with an eye toward the literature review. Not read to stay current in your field or search for the next lacuna to fill. Instead, read the way a fiction writer reads. Slowly, with attention to the sentence, asking at every turn not what is being said but how and why it works.
I’ve spent years working with academic writers as an editor and a book coach, and the problem I see is consistent across career stages. Most scholars don’t think of themselves as writers. They think of themselves as researchers, and they treat writing as a research-delivery device. The result is …
Read the full article at Inside Higher Ed or try some of the strategic models our deputy director, Daniela Blei, offers in the piece:
Joan Didion, for precision through removal
James Baldwin, for long sentences where every clause earns its place
Hanif Abdurraqib, for moving between the personal, the political and the analytical
Saidiya Hartman, for what happens when a scholar throws out the rule book
Vivian Gornick, for the difference between your material and what you make of it
Annie Dillard, for structuring around observation rather than argument
Ta-Nehisi Coates, for how voice and a strong frame can hold a whole book together
