How Scholars Write: Table of Contents and Preface

How Scholars Write introduces academic writers—undergraduates, graduate students, and other researchers—to the often surprising realities of how seasoned scholars research and write. Writers who are newer to academic research may find the gap between their own writing and published writing daunting. Published writing often appears to present brilliant thinking with ease. However, behind the scenes, the scholars producing that published writing are themselves learning, experimenting, writing and rewriting (and rewriting again), asking for help, and sometimes running into road blocks. This book takes you behind the scenes of scholars’ writing in order to dispel the notion that only people born brilliant can be academic writers. Rather, successful scholars practice principled strategies that anyone can adopt in order to craft academic writing that matters. Though the book contains a fair amount of practical advice, this is not an advice book. Instead, our project here is to present a transparent, principled, research-based description of how scholars actually get things written. We offer here not unbreakable rules but a mindset, not formulas but tools and techniques.