The Elements of Academic Style

Part of the pleasure of reading this lively, friendly, and truly unique book on academic writing is getting a sense of the pleasure with which the author obviously wrote it. With intelligence, generosity, and dare I say love, Eric Hayot makes us pay attention to that which we tend most to overlook or to give short shrift in scholarly practice-the act of style and its integral relation to critical thought-and moreover shows us how to enjoy the act of reclaiming it. Academic writers at all stages of experience will return to these pages again and again. -- Sianne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting My only criticism of The Elements of Academic Style is that it wasn't around thirty years ago, when I needed to learn everything, micro and macro, that this book teaches in its inimitable ways about the nature of scholarly writing. But I need it today just as much for its provocative suggestion that we unlearn what we believe we already know about seminar papers, chapters, dissertations, and books as kinds of writing. Challenging us to rethink what we ask our students to do (and why), Hayot links the demands of academic style to the possibilities of institutional reform. How long are seminar papers, and why do we need them anyway? Thanks to The Elements of Academic Style, we'll be debating these and many other questions for years to come. -- Andrew Parker, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University The Elements of Academic Style is an utter tour de force, a guide to scholarly writing in the humanities that manages to be at once lively, funny, absorbing, rigorous, and immensely insightful. It offers a wealth of advice from the minute and grammatical to the disciplinary and career-changing, even as it probes deeply into the humanities as they are actually practiced, in the nitty gritty of our writing. Intended for graduate students, who will benefit in untold ways from its wisdom, it is a boon for faculty as well, so acute are its observations and so intelligent its maxims. Like its progenitor, Elements of Academic Style has sweep, lucidity, and pitch-perfect style. But what most distinguishes this remarkable book are more unexpected qualities: its intimacy, and especially its generosity. Eric Hayot has given us all a gift. -- Sarah Cole, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University For literary critical postgraduates and their teachers this is a useful book. Times Literary Supplement [The Elements of Academic Style] has the potential to transform how we teach and practice academic writing, and it invites the kind of reading and engagement that makes such a transformation possible... A book well worth reading and rereading. -- Carla Nappi New Books Network Seminar A needed contribution to the literature on academic writing, Hayot's book will be invaluable to any writer in the humanities. CHOICE Excellent... The book is a comprehensive, incisive, and staggeringly overdue guide to writing humanistic scholarship... Written in assured, engaging prose, possessed of personality but not overbearing, The Elements should be required reading for everybody-students, faculty, even administrators-in the orbit of a humanities Ph.D. program. -- Louis Bury Hyperallergic