How to write academic texts: A practical guide is intended to serve as a rather brief and somewhat personal, yet instructive, treatise on how to think about academic writing. The first part of the book conceives of academic writing as based on a generic model that applies to virtually all kinds of publications including journal articles, doctoral theses, and research monographs. Understanding this “elementary morphology” of such texts—their outline, emplotment, and standard lines of reasoning—is of great help when it comes to reducing the time spent on the format of the text. The second part of the book addresses a few practical issues pertaining to the practice of writing and publishing and discusses the role of disciplined, yet open-minded reading, the importance of establishing writing routines that suit your personality and work life situation, and what to bear in mind when eventually disclosing written texts to external evaluators, be they supervisors, journal editors, or publishing house editors.

”Writing has a mysterious quality to it in academic work. Too many PhD students and scholars fear writing, and usually for the wrong reasons. Alexander Styhre reminds us that writing is based on reading, that the writing process can be managed, and that there is nothing mysterious about it. In this book, he has succeeded in capturing the problematics of crafting academic texts in a clear, informative, and vivid way. He is accessible without being naïve; theoretically elegant without being patronizing; and personal without being self-congratulatory. Although his main audience is PhD students and early career post-docs, Styhre’s book offers an extremely useful resource for everyone engaged in academic writing.”

Janne Tienari, Aalto University, Helsinki