If you want people to read your writing, it has to be readable. In Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, 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鈥攁ll 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鈥攊ncluding you鈥攊nto 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, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter shows how and why you have to make your writing connect with the people you鈥檙e writing for.
Awards and Recognition
- A Forbes Best Higher Education Book
"[Cassuto] offers academics — and other authors — important and candid advice while asking them to prioritize their audiences."鈥擬arybeth Gasman, Forbes
"A new guide teaches scholars how to write with readers in mind. [Cassuto] is calling for better communication across disciplines, which most certainly would advance not just writing but also all of science."鈥擩onathan Wai, Science
"An engaging, practical guide to how to become a better academic writer. . . . Witty and warm."鈥擬ichael Nietzel, Forbes
"One may hope this is the beginning of a virtuous crusade."鈥�Harvard Magazine
"[E]xcellent commonsense advice. Academic Writing as if Readers Matter is part writing manual for academics, part polemic (very persuasive!) on the importance of such writing. . . . Cassuto’s observations are correct, and nearly all his recommendations would be beneficial both to the academy and to the general culture."鈥擝rooke Allen, New Criterion
"It is a rare joy to find a guide to the care and feeding of a specific audience that is as clear and practical in its advice as that provided by Academic Writing as if Readers Matter. . . . Although primarily addressed to academics, much of the book’s advice is applicable to any writer who wants to improve their ability to reach and persuade. If you fall into this category, read the book and heed it. Your readers will appreciate it."鈥擯atrick Rufkin, Transactions on Professional Communication
"Advice in this book can apply to all forms of writing, including the celebrity magazine you encounter while checking out at the grocery store."鈥擩ean Bundy, International Association of Art Critics E-MAG 鈥嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧�嬧��
"Cassuto’s insights provide a road map for making writing instruction more relevant and engaging. In a time when students may be tempted to rely on AI, the key task for educators is to show them why writing still matters—and why their own voice, analysis and thinking are irreplaceable."鈥擲teve Mintz, Inside Higher Ed
"[A] book filled with good and sensible advice about a central problem—maybe the central problem—that bedevils academic writing: the care and humility needed to recognize the reader. . . . The humanities can teach us many things, but nothing more important than how to live our lives as if others mattered. In its modest way, Leonard Cassuto’s thoughtful and optimistic book is a reminder that scholars don’t live outside of the world but deeply in it, and that others—readers, people we don’t know and never will—are, after all, the ones that count."鈥擶illiam Germano, Journal of Scholarly Publishing
“Elegant, eloquent, useful, and necessary, this book is an exemplary act of intellectual citizenship at a time when it’s more imperative than ever to get across to the public what academics do and why it’s valuable. (This means you, dear professor.)”—Rick Perlstein, New York Times bestselling author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
“This witty and generous book offers a treasury of sound advice, astute analysis, and clear examples of dos and don’ts. Cassuto shows what it takes to welcome readers rather than alienate them.”—Andrew Delbanco, author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be
“From its title to its final sentence, I loved Academic Writing as if Readers Matter. Leonard Cassuto has created a small guidebook packed with big ideas that will help all writers—including natural and social scientists—reach broader audiences by clarifying their message. I plan to reread it periodically.”—Christopher Chabris, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
“With charm and wit, Cassuto argues that successful academic writing is an act of generosity toward the reader. He provides concrete strategies to help any scholar or student write in a way that genuinely engages readers.”—Rachael Cayley, author of Thriving as a Graduate Writer
“Brimming with invaluable advice and practical tips, this handbook should be read by any academic who wants their book to be read.”—Kevin M. Kruse, 快色直播 University
“Academic Writing as if Readers Matter will make almost anyone a better writer (it’s already having that effect on me), and that makes it a very rare and valuable thing. Professors and students need to read this book.”—Carlo Rotella, author of The World Is Always Coming to an End
