Grad School Book Club: On Writing

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Paul J Silvia: Writing productively does not require innate skills or special traits but specific tactics and actions. After describing strategies for writing productively, the author gives advice from the trenches on how to write, submit, revise, and resubmit articles.

Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article: Students and researchers all write under pressure, and the desire to impress your audience rather than to communicate with them—often lead to pretentious prose, academic posturing, and, not infrequently, writer’s block. First published nearly twenty years ago, this classic tells you how to conquer these pressures and simply write.

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success: Each week, readers learn a particular feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. At the end of the twelve weeks, they send their article to a journal. This invaluable resource is the only guide that focuses specifically on publishing humanities and social science journal articles. Here’s a YouTube Video summarizing the book in just 5 minutes.

Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded: provides advice on how to structure the story of your experiment, how to write effectively for different audiences/purposes (e.g. manuscript versus grants), all the way down to how to write paragraphs and choose words. He also provides many exercises for students to work through, making this a great book for structuring a science writing class.

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott: Advice on writing, and the often-quoted concept of a “shitty first draft”, is helpful to any graduate student struggling to write. She also has chapters on perfectionism, writer’s block, and writing groups, making this a simple and helpful read for grad students.

How to Write a Better Thesis: This concise guide emphasizes clear and logical structure as the key to a well-written thesis. Offering concrete examples of common structural problems, and numerous devices, tricks, and tests by which to avoid them. This updated edition reflects the changes in research style brought about by the Internet.

*This post was adapted from GradHacker’s 5 (More) Books All Grad Students Should Read, 5 Great Reads for Grad Students, and Thesis Whisperer’s 5 books to help you with your PhD.