How can professors and graduate students improve academic writing through conversations? We generally speak before we write. At least, to my knowledge, nobody has ever been born knowing how to write in APA…
How should you organize concepts in a large writing project? As an academic editor, I routinely hear these questions from clients: "How many concepts or theories do I need in my academic manuscript?"…
When editors get together, we often talk about process. We ask questions like: What does your onboard process look like? How can you generate metadata that's helpful to clients? Why are projects successful…
It's not you. Academic book conclusions are difficult to write, a difficulty that can be traced to the writing process itself. By the time an author gets to a book's conclusion, they may…
All my academic clients are interested in communicating complexity. In some cases, authors are researching and writing about a complex social problem like poverty or housing insecurity. Others are exploring a new idea…
You may find yourself confronting the reality that your editor has left the University Press you're working with. This can be a particularly crushing revelation if you liked working with them! Remember that…
In the classic Monty Python sketch Argument Clinic, a man played by Michael Palin approaches a receptionist and says "I'd like to buy an argument." After paying for it and entering the next…
While still in graduate school, after reading a book of mutual interest, I turned to my mentor and asked his opinion of it. He said that he thought the material was good. However,…
Academic authors I work with don't write stereotypical academic books. They want to avoid writing what I call “bricks"—academic tomes with an obtuse argument written for a small set of insiders. Bricks tend…