Style Points

From Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education

It is widely agreed, by both insiders and outsiders, that something has gone wrong with much academic writing.

A great deal of it, says Anthony Haynes, the author of Writing Successful Academic Books and visiting professor at both Beijing Normal and Hiroshima universities, is ruined by “a kind of learned inability. No one is born writing sentences laden with adverbs.”

John Cornwell, director of the Science and Human Dimension Project based at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a journalist and written a number of best-selling books about the papacy. He is firmly committed to the value of academic rigour and believes that “there are aspects of academic work and publishing that aren’t for a wider readership, but still need to be done”. Yet he also believes that “much academic writing suffers from rigor mortis”.

The publisher Andrew Franklin takes a similar line. He runs Profile Books, which he defines as “a classic trade publisher”, in the sense that its list is “aimed at people who want to read our books rather than have to read them”. About half are written by academics. Whatever the subject matter, he says, “the writing is always a crucial factor in publishing decisions”.

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