Stylish Academic Writing Helen Sword

Essay 1: Academic Writing

Prompt: For this essay, please identify several of the most useful and convincing ideas you find in Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing. Explain these ideas to an audience of readers who know little about academic writing, and nothing about Sword’s book. Include brief examples from the text as needed.

Tip: Notice that the prompt requires you to do two specific things: identify and explain. While this may seem like a request for neutral explanation, please notice that you are to actively decide which of Sword’s ideas are “the most useful and convincing.” Hence, your explanations of Sword should include elements of evaluation, as well: you are discerning what is of notable value, choosing what is worth including in your paper.

Length: 900 words minimum

Format Requirement: MLA format

Quotes Required: 3. Your response should include direct quotes from at least three of the four required chapters. You may quote Helen Sword and any of the authors she cites. After each quote, use parenthetical citations of the MLA variety. For example, after quoting a passage from the chapter, “your parenthetical citation should look like this” (Sword 44). This basic citation includes the author’s last name and the page number (no commas or abbreviations here). If you are quoting one of Sword’s examples, “it should look like this” (Stevenson qtd. in Sword 44). Here, we include the original author’s name and the abbreviation “qtd. in” as shorthand for “quoted in.”

For a handy guide to MLA citations and MLA format in general, see the Online Writing Lab.
(Links to an external site.)

Works Cited Page: A works cited page is required, even if your only source is Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing. Note: You only need one works cited entry for the book, since each chapter comes from the same book. Here is a link to the publisher’s information for the book itself.
(Links to an external site.)

You may list Stylish Academic Writing as an e-book using the information in the margins of the pdfs. Notice in my example below that I have italicized the book title and abbreviated “University Press” according to MLA guidelines:

Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard UP, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/saddleback-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3301112