This stimulating collection is the first to take on the issue of form and what it means to the future of scholarly writing. A wide range of distinguished scholars from fields including law, literature, and anthropology shed light on the ways scholars can write for different publics and still adhere to the standards of quality scholarship.
This stimulating collection is the first to take on the issue of form and what it means to the future of scholarly writing. A wide range of distinguished scholars from fields including law, literature, and anthropology shed light on the ways scholars can write for different publics and still adhere to the standards of quality scholarship.
In this guide to academic writing the author takes the reader step-by-step through the writing and publication process-from choosing a subject, developing content that will engage others, to submitting the final manuscript for publication.
How to transform a thesis into a publishable work that can engage audiences beyond the academic committee. When a dissertation crosses my desk, I usually want to grab it by its metaphorical lapels and give it a good shake. “You know something!” I would say if it could hear me. “Now tell it to us in language we can understand!” Since its publication in 2005, From Dissertation to Book has helped thousands of young academic authors get their books beyond the thesis committee and into the hands of interested publishers and general readers. Now revised and updated to reflect the evolution of scholarly publishing, this edition includes a new chapter arguing that the future of academic writing is in the hands of young scholars who must create work that meets the broader expectations of readers rather than the narrow requirements of academic committees. At the heart of From Dissertation to Book is the idea that revising the dissertation is fundamentally a process of shifting its focus from the concerns of a narrow audience—a committee or advisors—to those of a broader scholarly audience that wants writing to be both informative and engaging. William Germano offers clear guidance on how to do this, with advice on such topics as rethinking the table of contents, taming runaway footnotes, shaping chapter length, and confronting the limitations of jargon, alongside helpful timetables for light or heavy revision. Germano draws on his years of experience in both academia and publishing to show writers how to turn a dissertation into a book that an audience will actually enjoy, whether reading on a page or a screen. He also acknowledges that not all dissertations can or even should become books and explores other, often overlooked, options, such as turning them into journal articles or chapters in an edited work. With clear directions, engaging examples, and an eye for the idiosyncrasies of academic writing, he reveals to recent PhDs the secrets of careful and thoughtful revision—a skill that will be truly invaluable as they add “author” to their curriculum vitae.
This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Part of the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, this book interrogates current and emerging contexts of academic books from the perspectives of thirteen expert voices from the connected communities of publishing, academia, libraries, and bookselling.
Focusing on writing for publication, The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing discusses the components of a manuscript, types of manuscripts, and the submission process. It shows how to craft scholarly papers and other writing suitable for submission to academic journals. The handbook covers how to develop writing skills by offering guidance on becoming an excellent manuscript reviewer and outlining what makes a good review, and includes advice on follow-through with editors, rejection, and rewrites and re-submittals.
Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read—and to write. Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword’s analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce. Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changeso especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimediaonecessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin.Confronting a change-averse academy, she insists that before we can successfully change the systems through which we disseminate research, scholars must re-evaluate their ways of workingohow they research, write, and reviewowhile administrators must reconsider the purposes of publishing and the role it plays within the university. Springing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick's own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescence explores all of these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescence explores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain vibrant and relevant in the digital future.
This volume, the second of two in the series Creating the 21st-Century Academic Library that deals with the topic of open access in academic libraries, focuses on the implementation of open access in academic libraries. Chapters on the legalities and practicalities of open access in academic libraries address the issues associated with copyright, licensing, and intellectual property and include support for courses that require open access distribution of student work. The topic of library services in support of open access is explored, including the library’s role in providing open educational resources, and as an ally and driver of their adoption, for example, by helping defray author fees that are required for open access articles. A detailed look at open access in the context of undergraduate research is provided and considers how librarians can engage undergraduates in conversations about open access. Chapters consider ways to engage undergraduate students in the use, understanding, evaluation, and creation of open access resources. Issues that are of concern to graduate students are also given some attention and central to these are the development of Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) programs. A chapter examines the library’s role in balancing greater access to graduate student work with the consequences of openness, such as concerns about book contracts and sales, plagiarism, and changes in scholarly research and production. The book concludes with issues surrounding open data and library services in critical data librarianship, including advocacy, preservation, and instruction. It is hoped that this volume, and the series in general, will be a valuable and exciting addition to the discussions and planning surrounding the future directions, services, and careers in the 21st-century academic library.