A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.

The necessity of rigorous if uninspiring academic writing is perhaps best illustrated with the story of a prominent 18th-century intellectual named Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that illnesses ...

Let’s start with some good news: academic writing doesn’t have to be dense or difficult to read. As Helen Sword (2012) points out in her refreshing take on academic writing, the best scholarly ...

This phenomenon, characterised by an inability to produce new work or a creative slowdown, is particularly challenging in academic writing, where the pressures of deadlines, methodological rigour ...