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Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read – and to write. Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword's analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce. This book showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.

This paper addresses the theme of cross-cultural issues in the teaching of writing (Theme 4) through the cultural politics of knowledge and identity. Success in academic writing is dependent not merely on general competence, but also on an understanding of the constitutive cultural system of academic writing. In negotiating writing tasks, writers must also negotiate underlying assumptions of reader expectations and writing strategies which have decided cultural bases (Grabe and Kaplan 1996). What Canagarajah (2000) calls "the geopolitics of academic writing" (p. 85) arises from an asymmetry of power between academic writing and the Other discourses that it tends to negate. To perpetuate itself, academic writing conceals its own cultural roots which lie demonstrably in Western notions of rationality affiliated with the Enlightenment (Knoblauch and Brannon 1984 ). Thus what is, in fact, cultural is made to appear neutral. I explore these issues and the possibilities for an ethnologically informed practice via Canagarajah (2000), Ivanič (1998), Buell (2004), Bleich (1993), Prior (2004) and others.

Contemporary academic debates about online publishing raise important questions about the future of scholarly writing practices as more academics begin to explore the multinodal and participatory digital environment, seeking not only to study it but also to engage in the praxis and community building it makes possible. Through exploring why media studies scholars might choose to participate in online endeavors like In Media Res, I want to show how digital interactive technologies might enable a rethinking of the forms and functions of scholarly writing.

This book illustrates the use of ethnography as an analytical approach to investigate academic writing, and provides critical insights into how academic writing research can benefit from the use of ethnographic methods. Throughout its six theoretical and practice-oriented studies, together with the introductory chapter, foreword and afterword, ethnography-related concepts like thick description, deep theorizing, participatory research, research reflexivity or ethics are discussed against the affordances of ethnography for the study of academic writing. The book is key reading for scholars, researchers and instructors in the areas of applied linguistics, academic writing, academic literacies and genre studies. It will also be useful to those lecturers and postgraduate students working in English for Academic Purposes and disciplinary writing. The volume provides ethnographically-oriented researchers with clear pointers about how to incorporate the telling of the inside story into their traditional main role as observers.

Abstract
This editorial note focuses on why practitioners complain about academic writing. It starts with how important it is for media and journalism academics to write lively and in a lucid way to be clearly understood by their peers and the people they research. It highlights research about the correlation between the way we think and the way we write. It provides a few samples of what the author sees as poor academic writing. It discusses the impact digital and free and open access publishing is having on academic content and writing. It ends with a few suggestions.