Review of Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword (Harvard University Press, 2012, 230 pages).
his book, published way back in 2012 BC (Before Covid),
was highly influential and is often cited today.
Unlike many other writing style books, it says
nothing about split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions.
This is a wise decision: software like Grammarly can find most of these.
The author’s primary goal is to help academics make academic
papers more readable.
Even though it’s old, I want to discuss it because
the ideas Helen Sword advocated have permeated the entire
genre of self-help writing books.
Sword doesn’t ask why making academic writing readable is a good thing. She quite reasonably assumes that it is, and that people write badly because they’re afraid of appearing unprofessional. Though she read a thousand papers to get data for this book, it seems to me that one also needs to understand why academic writing is bad if one wants to improve it.
Sword’s approach relies on three unstated assumptions: (1) Academics want people to read their papers; (2) Readers want to be entertained; and (3) Making their papers more readable would improve them.
To improve their writing, Sword advocated using direct verbs. Avoid passive voice. Use human interest stories to create a sympathetic bond between the author and the reader. Most of this advice is good. Direct verbs, active voice, and even personal pronouns can make papers easier to read, and scientists have accepted the criticisms and learned to use them all. But if you want to bond with something, my advice is to get a book on cyanoacrylate adhesives.
There’s a new one by K.L. Mittal and Dovid Aronovich coming out in early 2027 that looks pretty good. And it’s only $245.00!
Authors want you to read their papers
Based on my experience helping postdocs and students with their writing, and reading literally thousands of grants and papers (I still have 6,140 of them on my computer), I am convinced that Sword’s first assumption is wrong. Authors don’t want you to read their papers. That is why they write obscurely.
The purpose of a scientific paper is to make sure as few people as possible read it. If they do, either they will like it, in which case you have created a competitor; or they won’t like it, in which case you have created an enemy who will try to discredit your theory. Even worse, they might find some mistake, in which case you might be forced to retract it. The main purpose of a scientific paper is to add a line to the author’s CV. Academic bureaucrats count them. Tenure is based on whatever number they get. Sometimes they even count correctly.
The academics are writing under duress and they will write as badly as they can get away with. And I don’t blame them.
Covid added a new reason to write obscurely. After Covid, the science establishment circled the wagons: journals adopted tighter paywalls and authors adopted a more obscure and technical writing style. The purpose was to prevent people from reading their articles. They believed if people did, the articles might be cited in the popular media and their political enemies would use them in support of populist causes. During Covid, some authors designed experiments specifically to discredit treatments they thought were being advocated by people they didn’t like. Some even retracted their own papers because they believed this was happening. Others wrote specifically to deceive the public into accepting their political views. Anthony Fauci was one egregious example, but there were dozens of them.
Today the tables have turned. Authors now complain bitterly about self-censorship, which is like complaining that one is eating too much junk food or combing one’s own hair wrong.
Readers want to be entertained
Helen Sword’s second assumption, that readers want to be entertained, is also debatable. Let’s compare two examples: Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler and Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, 6th edition by Cotton, Wilkinson, Murillo, and Bochmann.
Gravitation starts off with “Once upon a time a student lay in a garden under an apple tree.” The paragraph ends with the student exclaiming, “What a beautiful geodesic!” Yes, that is human interest. But do students really want this? What is the sound of 100,000 physics students rolling their eyes? There has to be a Lagrangian for that.
The inclusion of this little story, cute as it may be, signals to the reader that this 1279-page, 5.058-pound doorstopper is going to try to make you feel a sense of awe. It also signals that getting information out of it won’t be easy: the reader will have to spend extra work deciding whether it’s safe to skip all the useless people stuff.
By contrast, Advanced Inorganic Chemistry gets straight to the point (skipping the first paragraph, which is always fluff):
One way to describe the structure of a coordination compound, or any molecule, ABn, wherein the central atom A is linked to n peripheral atoms, B, is to state the polyhedron whose vertices correspond to the positions of the B atoms.
I guess these are case studies or maybe anecdotes, so I’m indeed following Sword’s advice here. But these two examples show the value of leading the reader right into the subject matter instead opening with a joke as we’re sometimes told to do.
Be honest: would you rather read about a student peeling an apple and admiring the curved trajectory of the chunks falling to Earth under the influence of gravity, or about the fact that alkylidene complexes can be formed by reactions of metalloporphyrin with halogenated solvents? There’s no contest. If you’re reading to learn something, it just wastes your time if the author starts babbling about people. To be totally honest, humans aren’t that interesting, which is why we’re reading a book in the first place.
Sword’s example of a great ‘academic’ book is Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable. This popular book illustrates the risks: Dawkins wastes two minutes of the reader’s life joking about figs. Yes, figs. Some people, he says, believe that Eve gave Adam a fig instead of an apple in the Garden of Eden story. He’s obviously trying to get the reader to like him (the term Sisyphean task comes to mind). It isn’t an academic book, but essentially politics: Dawkins wants to convince you that the Bible is wrong and evolution is correct. A typical reader encountering this and reading the jokes would probably classify it as an airplane book.
Making them more readable would improve them
It’s a common myth that technical people enjoy fantasy stories. One scientist friend of mine wouldn’t stop telling me how much she hated Lord of the Rings. Admittedly this is also not an academic text. It’s the story of a kid trying to throw away a piece of jewelry and almost failing. Why does one ring rule other rings? Tolkien could have explained it in one sentence and saved us hours of reading. We never do find out how that ring is supposed to work.
Of course we know Lord of the Rings is not about jewelry at all. Tolkien’s goal was to convey the message is that humans value power above all else. That can’t be done by just stating it because it’s a message that people don’t want to hear. Maybe that’s why my friend hated it.
Helen Sword writes:
Stylish academic writers transform stories into plots through careful attention to elements such as character, setting, point of view, and narrative sequence. In the researcher’s story, the potential human characters include the researcher and all the other people .. . [p. 91]
She suggests writing down the ‘characters’ (i.e. theories), ‘settings’, and ‘point of view’ as if writing a novel. In my experience this doesn’t actually work. Avian Cognition: Exploring the Intelligence, Behavior, and Individuality of Birds tried it. By page 257, the author was saying things like
Then I noticed something glistening. ... I looked closer and realized a tear was welling up in Uzziel’s eye. Uzziel [the name of the author’s budgerigar] was crying, without making a sound.
Scientists and engineers don’t care if you have a “compelling narrative” and they really don’t care if your tweety bird starts crying, as sad as it may be. They want to know the three crystal modifications of titanium oxide and why isometries are important on a space-time manifold. Everything else is wasting their time.
All writing serves a purpose. Helen Sword’s book may be great advice for writers of popular nonfiction, but what it and the many others like it overlook is that the purpose of reading is not necessarily to be entertained. And the purpose of writing, especially in academia, is not necessarily to communicate.
aug 02 2026, 4:55 am
