The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

This is an urgently-needed work for the small group of people insane enough to go to grad school for literature/cultural studies; it addresses a very specific set of writing tasks, and does so elegantly, comprehensibly, and delightfully. This book makes explicit and manageable the very *implicit* norms of professional academic literary scholarship. I wish it had been available when I began my dissertation--SIX YEARS AGO.The first section of the book covers the practice of writing--the rhythms and habits of professional academic writers. Some of this material can be gleaned from other work on academic writing (Silva, Boice), but its inclusion in this book makes it a one-stop shop. (And it's comforting to know that others, too — people who have succeeded in this profession — feel the same fears and insecurities around their writing as I do!)The second section, "Strategy," looks at the structure of the most common genres in literary studies—it covers the larger structures (introductions, conclusions, rhythms, etc.) that make the work "go." This section helps the writer develop the mechanics of the work—the structures that drive the argument along and make it make sense. (In my experience, this level of writing is rarely explicitly addressed, except in the work of George Gopen and Joe Williams, but Gopen and Williams are necessarily aiming at a far broader audience. Hayot's book focuses on the structural patterns specific to literary studies.)The third section, "Tactics," addressed the lower-level elements of scholarly writing: footnotes and citation practices, language norms, rhetorically-effective patterns for paragraphs, etc. Dr. Hayot is correct that "no other book...gives this kind of detailed guidance for scholarly writers in the humanities" (3). This section, especially, is absolutely invaluable for academic writers in their apprenticeship. It explicitly lays out all the normative writing practices that we're normally expected to absorb just by reading.I will recommend this book to every graduate student in literary studies that I come across for the rest of my life. And when I have my own graduate students (cross your fingers for me) I will give them all their own copies of it.I wish I could hug the author. That's how important, and wonderful, this book is.

I can not praise this book enough. Some chapters are self-deprecating and laugh-out-loud funny; others make you feel that you are in a tutorial by a master carpenter who is teaching you how to build a (written) house, beam by beam. I have bought several copies to circulate within the Visual and Cultural Studies Grad Program at the U. of Rochester. Everyone else: it is a bargain on Amazon: $15.Written by a literary scholar, it is useful for anyone writing grad papers, dissertations, articles, and books in the humanities. Many of the other reviewers cover its many strengths, so I will not repeat them here. I have been writing academic art history for 40 years. I can attest to the usefulness of his very practical (and often funny) recommendations in chapter 3. Anyone who wants to learn how to deliberately build an argument in prose that other academics will want to read should study this book from cover to cover. A masterpiece.

Chapter 8 alone is worth the price of this book. It is a book that will be of value for all academic writers not only those who are writing in the humanities. The examples are humanities focused, but it is easy to extrapolate to social sciences.

Above all, this is a refreshing book--Hayot actually believes that academic writing is something other than a cesspool of bad-faith, jargony obfuscation, that it might somehow be governed by generic rules different from those of a New Yorker article, and that it, just maybe, deserves to be celebrated (see his related 2014 Critical Inquiry article, "Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do" [vol. 41, pp. 53-77], for more along these lines). Even if (like me) you don't necessarily share Hayot's enthusiasm for Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, this is a great attitude to have so openly represented.Second, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read (if you are a reasonably self-aware academic in the humanities, at least). For that reason alone I would recommend graduate students to just go get it; this is the real thing. But if you want to learn more... well, keep reading. Hayot offers advice in four basic domains: psychological self-help, developing writing habits, understanding the world of academic writing as something like a spiritual system, and concrete writing advice (from broad structural issues to footnoting practice). There aren't any other books that offer this mixture of help with academic writing. Hayot's big, original (as far as I know) concept is what he calls the "Uneven U": paragraphs should start at a modest level of abstraction, descend to concrete details and evidence, and then finish up at the high end again (from 4 down to 1-2 and up to 5, on his scale where 5 is the topmost level of abstraction and 1 is unmediated evidence). This structure generates a forward, propulsive motion; it applies to broader sections within an essay as well as to paragraphs. Once you start looking, something like this structure can be detected in at least some kinds of academic writing. Elsewhere, Hayot offers a concise and specific set of habits and practices you can cultivate in order to become an effective writer; he goes through his reader-centric theory of writing (very similar to what you can get in Booth, Colomb, and Williams' Craft of Research, which Hayot surprisingly omits from his discussion and bibliography); etc. (Check the table of contents and the other review here for more details.) Grad students will find a lot of reassurance in these pages.The rest of this review goes into some shortcomings (I gave the book just four stars, after all). There are two big ones, one Hayot's fault, the other not. To begin with the second--this may be the press's responsibility--the title of this book promises considerably more than it delivers. Hayot himself is clear in the introductory material that the book is primarily aimed at literary-critical scholars(hip); he is a professor of comparative literature, so this is good and proper and as it should be. But it does mean that his disciplinary scope is not the titular "humanities" but something much more restricted; I am not sure how much help graduate students in philosophy or history (for example) will get from this book. All of Hayot's examples and much of his presuppositions about what academic writing does derive from literary scholarship. In my own field (a non-contemporary area study) most scholarship conceives itself as primarily "empirical" or positivist, rather than "critical" or self-reflexive, and so most scholarship bears little resemblance to what Hayot has in mind. Even in its most literature-oriented modes, this field (along with many others in the humanities) is very different from scholarship in English or comp lit, being mainly about various constellations of "facts." This point, then, shades directly into the second shortcoming: the book has a lot to say about writing as a practice and as a product, but there's basically nothing at all about how you come by having something to say--in other words, there's almost nothing about research. I think to most graduate students, the idea of cultivating a daily writing habit sounds great (Hayot suggests writing in defined blocks during the mornings and early afternoons when one's schedule is free of other responsibilities) but we're not really sure where the research process fits in, or how you are supposed to sit down and produce scholarship on a schedule. Especially given Hayot's otherwise concrete attention to the process of writing, it was disappointing that he has nothing to say about the process leading up to a first draft (he also has almost nothing specific to say about revision, in sharp contrast to most other books about writing).Moving into more trivial matters, obviously everyone will have their own reactions to different parts of a book; so, to me, a fair bit here seemed rather obvious (do graduate students really need a multi-page explanation of the idea that journals are different from one another?) while other parts didn't jibe at all with my own experience (Hayot loves to point out that writing seminar papers is terrible preparation for writing articles; this is clearly true, but one of his favorite topics is the difference in citational density between seminar papers and articles--for fun, I checked a few of his published journal articles, and I've never written a seminar paper with fewer footnotes or smaller bibliographies... so clearly the first conclusion is that this is a major disciplinary difference between our fields, but a second conclusion is that, again, his advice and remarks should be taken with grains of salt by academics outside literature departments).Clearly I could keep the complaints coming. So let me reiterate that this is a great book. A lot of what Hayot says is discipline-specific; but so what--it's still valuable. And a lot of it isn't. It would be great if a future edition included a new section, or at least a chapter, on the research process, on how Hayot moves from a glimmer of an idea through long hours in the library and a mess of notes to a finished version of a paper, but even without such a discussion this is a really useful book. And above all, it's fun!(Yes, I am also named Eric. I promise I'm not the author.)

Loving this book. It has really helped me organise my writing and commit to my arguments

Brilliantly written, in an accessible and witty way. I enjoyed reading about academic writing, who knew!? Learned so much from it too.

Elegantly written; useful tips.

Concise, clear and accurate. Ideal for every level.

Very useful book.