This blog post will be updated regularly.
Academic writing is a craft. Like all crafts, it requires practice, but it can also be learned. Unfortunately, resources to learn academic writing are somewhat scattered. In this blog post, I lost some of my suggested resources, including books and blogs, tools to help you write better, and other resources to improve your visualizations.
Accompanying this post is The Big List of Academic Writing Tips.
Books
The Elements of Style (William Strunk Jr.): a short but dense reference, and a great way to revise the basics
Oxford Guide to Plain English (Martin Cutts): a manual on writing clearly (better known as Plain English writing), with short and focused chapters that can be read independently
The Craft of Scientific Writing (Michael Alley): a guide to the essential elements of scientific academic writing, especially relevant to students or returning academics
They Say, I Say (Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein): a book about how to write persuasive literature reviews by summarizing what others said (They Say) and your conclusions from it (I Say)
Stylish Academic Writing (Helen Sword): an exploration of the elements of style in academic writing, with spotlights on individual writers’ styles
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (William Zinsser): a guide about the principles, methods and techniques of nonfiction writing, which overlaps considerably with academic writing
Reading Like a Writer (Francine Prose): a more advanced handbook for academics who want to cultivate their writing style by analyzing other writers’ styles
Writing tools
Power thesaurus: an easy-to-use thesaurus that shows synonyms, antonyms and related words, supports filtering by parts of speech, and provides common synonyms and antonyms to refine searches
Vocabulary.com: an online dictionary with custom vocabulary lists and practice exercises based on spaced repetition
Adonis: a LaTeX template that I designed to be simple, elegant and readable; also available as an Overleaf template
Apostrophe: an open-source, simple Markdown editor for Linux, ideal for distraction-free drafting or short sessions of free-writing
Obsidian: a Markdown note-taking app that, among many other features, supports linking notes together, ideal when planning literature reviews
Visualizations
Multiplex: an extension to Python’s matplotlib that I developed to make it easier to create aesthetically-pleasing visualizations and to annotate figures with text
Storytelling with Data: an essential manual on designing visualizations that tell stories; also has a blog
The Royal Statistical Society’s Best Practices for Visualizations: a shorter primer on best practices for visualizations
Nightingale Magazine: a magazine and blog with interviews, tips and explorations of quality visualizations; also works as a source of inspiration