Category Scholarly writing

Chatting with a group of college and university librarians recently, I was struck by both their enthusiasm and their frustration: enthusiasm over the increasing power of technology to aid in scholarly research, and frustration that educating students and teachers is…

Geoffrey Pullum’s musings on our tendency to see motes in the writing of others while ignoring logs in our own raises the question of how writers are supposed to edit themselves in the first place.

If you answered “True,” would you also say that all pizzas are not edible, or that all editors are not sticklers, or that all peeves are not justified? As you know very well, you would be wrong in every case.

Not long ago an author e-mailed us in dismay: An image in his newly published book was wrong.

Erin Brenner’s recent post at The Writing Resource, “Nine Words to Avoid in Your Writing,” wasn’t about banning words. It was about avoiding the kinds of words that Bryan Garner calls “skunked”: those whose meanings are so controversial they’re guaranteed to provoke reader fury. Bemused, comprise, data, hopefully—you know the type. (Read more)

Preparing notes and bibliographies in a consistent style has long been one of the less glamorous tasks of academic writing. And now, with the increasing use—or rather misuse—of citation software, it is surely one of the most rapidly degenerating. A recent poll of university teachers who happened to e-mail me the other day showed that although four of the six

I’m a writer, just starting out. I’m based in Australia and I have had a couple of articles published and am wanting to sell them to other publications. What is the best way of going about this?

Word processors are wondrously fun to play with, and writers who secretly believe they have a talent for graphic design (but who have never actually studied it) seem unable to resist availing themselves of every bell and whistle.

Don’t ever tell a copyeditor that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. To begin with, anyone who knows the context of that chestnut knows that Emerson wasn’t thinking about whether website has a hyphen when he wrote it, and…