Academic Writing as If Readers Matter

How teachers and students can write better by anticipating and meeting the needs of readers

If you want people to read your writing, it has to be readable. In How to Write Well and Why We Must, Leonard Cassuto offers academic writers a direct, practical prescription for writing that will be read and understood: Take care of your reader. With a wealth of examples from the arts and sciences, this short, witty book provides invaluable advice to writers at all levels, in all fields, on how to write better for both specialized and broad audiences.

Good academic writing depends on connecting with readers, earning their time and attention. Cassuto offers tips and advice on how to sharpen arguments and make complex ideas compelling. He addresses the workings of introductions and conclusions, transitions, signposts, paragraphs, and sentences--all the building blocks of academic writing. He also shows how storytelling and metaphor can make your prose more engaging than you thought possible. And he explains the proper use of that most dangerous of tools: jargon.

This book can make any academic writer--including you--into a better writer. That means becoming a better communicator of the ideas and discoveries you want the world to grasp. For the sake of readers inside the academy and beyond it, How to Write Well and Why We Must shows how and why you have to make your writing connect with the people you're writing for.