Modern academics are not celebrated for the clarity and felicity of their writing. One of the most important lessons a postgraduate student can learn—and if he doesn’t learn it soon, he’s doomed—is that academics generally do not write books and articles for the purpose of expressing their ideas as clearly as possible for the benefit of people who don’t already understand and agree with them. Academics don’t write to be read; they write to be published. Typically, the only people who actually read academic books and articles are other academics, who only read them to know what they need to reference in their own books and articles. And that’s not reading; that’s trawling. 

Helen Sword, associate professor at the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland, wants to persuade her colleagues that they can do better. She has written Stylish Academic Writing in order to “give courage to academics who want to write more engagingly but fear the consequences of violating disciplinary norms.” But surely the point is that the vast majority of academics don’t “aspire to write more engagingly and adventurously.”