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The Elements of Academic Style
The Elements of Academic
Style
WRITING FOR THE HUMANITIES

Eric Hayot

Columbia University Press

New York
 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-53741-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hayot, Eric, 1972–
The elements of academic style : writing for the humanities / Eric Hayot.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-231-16800-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16801-4 (pbk. :
alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-231-53741-4 (e-book)
1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher) 2. Academic writing
—Study and teaching (Higher) 3. Humanities—Study and teaching (Higher) 4.
Critical thinking—Study and teaching (Higher) I. Title.

PE1404.H3943 2014
808.06'6378—dc23
2013048155

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at
[email protected].

COVER DESIGN: Julia Kushnirsky

COVER IMAGE: © Corbis

References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the
author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have
expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
 Contents

One Why Read This Book?

Part I Writing as Practice

Two Unlearning What You (Probably) Know

Three Eight Strategies for Getting Writing Done
Four Institutional Contexts
Five Dissertations and Books
Six A Materialist Theory of Writing
Seven How Do Readers Work?

Part II Strategy

Eight The Uneven U

Nine Structure and Subordination
Ten Structural Rhythm
Eleven Introductions
Twelve Don’t Say It All Early
Thirteen Paragraphing
Fourteen Three Types of Transitions
Fifteen Showing Your Iceberg
 Sixteen Metalanguage
Seventeen Ending Well
Eighteen Titles and Subtitles

Part III Tactics

Nineteen Citational Practice

Twenty Conference Talks
Twenty-one Examples
Twenty-two Figural Language
Twenty-three Footnotes and Endnotes
Twenty-four Jargon
Twenty-five Parentheticals
Twenty-six Pronouns
Twenty-seven Repetition
Twenty-eight Rhetorical Questions and Clauses
Twenty-nine Sentence Rhythm
Thirty Ventilation
Thirty-one Weight

Part IV Becoming

Thirty-two Work as Process

Thirty-three Becoming a Writer
Thirty-four From the Workshop to the World (as Workshop [as
World])
Thirty-five Acknowledgments
Appendix: A Writer’s Workbook
Works Cited
Bibliography
 One
Why Read This Book?

Writing is not the memorialization of ideas. Writing distills, crafts,

and pressure-tests ideas—it creates ideas. Active, engaged writing
makes works from words. And these works belong, in turn, to the
means that made them. They emerge from a process; they represent
their becoming, and that emergence, in their final form.
Writing is, therefore, a kind of learning. I say so to oppose writing
to dictation, to a conception of writing as a necessary but tedious
step in the distribution and fixation of ideas. Conceiving of writing as
the process whereby you put down thoughts you already have will
give you a bad theory of what writing does and can do. As an idea of
writing’s purpose, it tends to make for mediocre writers and mediocre
prose. Writing as though you already know what you have to say
hinders it as a medium for research and discovery; it blocks the
possibilities—the openings—that appear at the intersection of an
intention and an audience, and constitute themselves, there, as a
larger, complete performance. Active writing should not involve
saying things you already understand and know, but instead let you
think new things. And that is why, this book will argue, you cannot
know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set them down in
sentences, whether on paper or on screen. It is also why the essay
or the book you write will not be, if you are open and generous and
unafraid, the essay or book you started with. To understand that
process as a good thing and to develop a writing practice that helps
you inhabit it: those are the two projects of this book.
Why read this book instead of any other book about academic
writing? To answer that question, let’s look at the three major types
of books of this type that scholars in literary studies might be
tempted to read:

1. Books addressing nonfiction style, especially at the level of the

paragraph and the sentence, though often including a general ethos
of writing as well. This category, the largest of the three, includes
Strunk and White’s famous Elements of Style, Jacques Barzun’s
Simple and Direct, Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk & Bite, Roy Peter Clark’s
Writing Tools, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Joseph
Williams’s Style. Most of these books assume a college-educated
audience; almost all focus heavily on semi-journalistic forms like the
magazine essay. None of them address scholarly writing at all. The
exceptions are Helen Sword’s recently published Stylish Academic
Writing, whose focus on major features of nonfictional style
(storytelling, sentencing, jargon, etc.) draws from examples from
across the academic disciplines, from the humanities to the hard
sciences, and Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly, which deals
almost exclusively with academic writing in the social sciences.
2. Books focused on the psychological and working structures
that help people write. Some of these are for lay audiences and
undergraduate students, including Peter Elbow’s Writing Without
Teachers and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Others
focus specifically on the kinds of problems the academic
professoriate faces, such as Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers,
Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot, and Joan Bolker’s Writing Your
Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day (a sentence from the
introduction of that book: “I don’t actually know anyone who’s [written
a dissertation] in only fifteen minutes a day.”).
3. Books that cover the formal patterns and structure necessary
to produce specific academic genres. Books like William Germano’s
From Dissertation to Book or The Thesis and the Book, edited by
Eleanor Harman and her colleagues, follow this format. In this
category you will also find something like Wendy Belcher’s excellent
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, which includes advice
about work patterns alongside its highly detailed analysis about the
journal article as a genre.
 The Elements of Academic Style covers ground from all three of
these areas. The first part of the book, “Writing as Practice,” frames
the discussion of academic style by talking about how writing is
currently taught (implicitly and explicitly) in graduate school. It goes
on to offer advice about psychological and social structures designed
to promote writing and looks at the institutional contexts that govern
the major genres in humanistic style (mainly the kind of thing that
appears in books of the second and third type). I also present an
ethos of writing—a way of thinking about what writing does, and how
it should work—that aims to help you understand why you might
write a certain way, or why I recommend certain structural strategies
or sentence-level choices. Together, these pieces of advice guide
you toward an understanding of writing as an extensively lived
practice governed by (and governing in turn) a wide variety of
behaviors, attitudes, institutional patterns, and personal and social
regimes.
The book’s second part, “Strategy,” examines large-scale
structures that govern the production of scholarship in literary and
cultural studies, including introductions, conclusions, structural
rhythm, transitions, and so on. The third part, “Tactics,” covers lower-
level aspects of writing practice: footnotes, figurative language,
diction, ventilation, and a variety of other concepts that usually
operate below the level of a writer’s conscious activity. I know of no
other book that gives this kind of detailed guidance for scholarly
writers in the humanities (Helen Sword’s book comes closest, but
flies at a higher altitude). It’s in the detailed, writing instruction about
scholarship—breaking down the “Uneven U” paragraph,
demonstrating how to “show your iceberg,” laying out a continuum of
metadiscursive practice, or working through three major types of
transitions, all of these specifically focused on scholarship in literary
and cultural studies—that this book offers things you can’t find
anywhere else.
The Elements of Academic Style is mostly written for scholars in
literary and cultural studies, whether graduate students or members
of the faculty. At its most particular, it is a book about how to write
“theory,” or rather, how to write literary scholarship in the mode that
was born out of the influence of philosophy and cultural studies on
literary criticism over the last three decades. I make no guarantees
as to its general applicability! Might these lessons only work for
someone with my idiosyncratic educational trajectory; my
Continental, soupless childhood; or my suspiciously comedic history
of psychological disasters? Perhaps. But perhaps again you and I
share, happily, a history of psychological disasters. In which case
what works for me may well work, mutatis mutandis, for you as well.
I do think that, regardless of who you are, many of the lessons
here are abstractable for general use. Readers outside the literature
Ph.D. sweet spot—interested undergraduates and amateurs, or
professional historians and philosophers of all stripes—will
undoubtedly find lessons to take home, if they are willing to account
on their own dime for field-specific differences in style. Because in
the long run I don’t care whether you write just like me. I care
whether you write just like you—that you come to scholarly prose
with both purpose and intention, that you take it seriously as a craft,
that you understand how and why you do what you do, that you
strive to do more than reproduce the stylistic average of your age
and experience. And that you follow, in the long run, the path that
you make.
This is a book for finding your way.
 Part I
Writing as Practice
 Two
Unlearning What You (Probably) Know

Why write a book on scholarly writing for graduate students and

faculty in the humanities? Partly because no such book exists.
Other volumes, most famously Strunk and White’s Elements of
Style, cover aspects of writing essayistic nonfiction style at the
sentence level. Even fewer cover structure; Joseph M. Williams’s
Style stands out in that arena. Fewer still focus specifically on
academic style, and those that do tend to cover broad swaths of the
social sciences and humanities, and even, like Helen Sword’s Stylish
Academic Writing, the sciences as well. A number of books help with
psychology and time management; still others are geared toward
making dissertations into books. All are useful, yet all aim broader,
narrower, or to the side of what this book wants to do. What’s more,
some of these books are written by people who seem to be jerks, or
at least are perfectly happy to take on that role in prose. Being the
ideal reader of Jacques Barzun’s Simple & Direct, for instance,
entails reading a sentence like “we are forced to notice our
contemporaries’ fumbling purpose in the choice and manufacture of
words” and feeling like you want to belong to that “we.” I don’t.
Writing is hard, and it gives me little pleasure to feel contempt for
those who don’t do it well. I’m among them often enough.
But the main reason to write for faculty and students in literature
is to counteract the current state of writing instruction in graduate
programs. Mostly such instruction doesn’t happen at all. This is
startling when you consider that writing well in two or three major
professional forms—the conference paper, the twenty-five- to thirty-
five-page journal article or longer book chapter, and the complete
book—is one of the most important things you should know how to
do, and how to do well, as an academic. It is more startling to realize
that even when writing is taught—and it is, though usually
unconsciously and implicitly—what little instruction that does happen
doesn’t actually teach students how to write in those important
professional formats, instead often inculcating habits that make it
more difficult to write well in them. All in all, much of what graduate
school teaches about writing and writing practice makes things
harder and worse.
Let me explain. Many writing assignments given in graduate
courses in literary and cultural studies (and in their upper-level
undergraduate cousins) involve asking students to write an end-of-
term essay, usually twenty to thirty pages in length, that connects
thematically to the course material. Students usually conceive of and
write these essays in the final three to four weeks of the semester.
All of these essays receive grades, but only a small subset of them
ever gets marked up and commented on. (Many are simply never
seen again.) If you are a student like I was, you will, after reading the
professor’s comments, put the essay away and never think about it
again. The new semester follows; you have new reading and work to
do; summer teaching begins; or you have to study for your
comprehensive exams.
Yet everything we know about writing tells us that lessons about
style, structure, and argument don’t take without commentary or
revision. In fact, if you’ve been a graduate student in English, you’ve
spent quite a bit of time trying to convince recalcitrant
undergraduates to believe and practice that very thing. So why does
the vast majority of graduate education in U.S. programs in literature
happen without extensive discussion of writing, or any active,
institutionally structured revision?
Let us recognize the exceptions. Many professors do bring
writing instruction into the classroom, and a number of graduate
programs have a course dedicated specifically to writing practice. A
friend of mine speaks of a wonderful intro-to-grad-school class (his
was taught by taught by Sam Otter, at UC Berkeley, in English),
where students wrote a critical review of scholarship, an
argumentative essay, and a final ten- to fifteen-page work of literary
criticism. Another colleague at the University of Arizona some years
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