Writing Clearly: Style and Referencing Issues

Abstract

An author with a well-organized piece of text must still pass two further hurdles before gaining credibility or approval in academic professional circles. The first is a test of style. Does the author communicate fluently, convincingly and appealingly in the professional manner appropriate for her discipline? Quite where success or failure should be determined here is difficult to specify in any general way. Evaluations of good or bad writing style are notoriously subjective. Much ink has been spilt on good style for novelists and creative writers (see Further Reading on p. 287 for some style manuals). But this literature offers little help to authors of doctoral theses or other large professional bits of text, like academic books. However, it is still possible to pull together some generally useful advice about conflicting style pressures, and some sensible ways of proceeding at a paragraph-by-paragraph, or sentence-by-sentence level, as I try to do in the first part of this chapter.

Poorer writers have fewer readers.

Robert J. Sternberg ¹