7 Amazing Books That Will Boost Your Academic Writing

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7 Amazing Books That Will Boost Your Academic Writing

Unfortunately for those looking for quick fixes, there is no way to become an awesome essay writer overnight. No amount of useful tips and tricks will help you write a quality custom essay if you currently have no skills. In the end, the only way to get better is to read more good texts, practice writing, and get feedback, which takes a lot of time. That said, there are books that can help you speed the process up. They won’t miraculously make a Mark Twain out of you, but they will help you avoid common mistakes and better understand what makes good writing good.

Revising Prose by Richard Lanham

This work should be a handbook of every person willing to become a better writer. It provides clear, definite, step-by-step instructions for improving your style and learning how to write concise, clean, and easily readable texts. It is especially valuable due to the high number of interesting and demonstrative examples proving this or that point.

The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth et al.

A huge portion of work any academic paper takes is spent doing research, gathering sources, analyzing them, and formulating your thesis. In fact, writing is just the tip of the iceberg you will spend much more time on preparation for writing than on writing itself. This book will teach you how to find relevant sources, distinguish reliable sources from unreliable and biased ones, narrow down your research questions, formulate arguments to backup your viewpoint, and many other useful things.

Bird by Anne Lamott

Learning writing tips doesn’t have to be a chore, and Anne Lamott proves it with her brilliant book Bird by Bird. The secret is that it isn’t a reference or instruction book per se it is a memoir in which she tells how she came to be an author, how she perfected her skills and reached the position she currently occupies. It is an incredibly interesting and entertaining read incorporating numerous first-hand writing tips by an extremely experienced writer, as well as some sound pieces of life advice. If you want to get better at writing and have a good time in the process, this is the book to pick up.

100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost

The title may look a bit generic and run-of-the-mill, but give this book a chance, and you will find a treasure-trove of the sound advice you can start using immediately. What is even more important, it is written in a way that immediately illustrates a case in point, so that you don’t just get the theory behind a thing, but also see how each particular tip is applied in practice.

Writing with Power by Peter Elbow

If it isn’t any particular discipline or academic writing per se that give you grief but writing in general and especially writer’s block, this book by Peter Elbow can be a way out. It covers a number of useful techniques that can make the process of putting words on paper easier, for example, freewriting. Although the book was published quite some time ago, it doesn’t really matter all the tips it gives have passed the test of time and are as viable today as twenty years ago.

Becoming an Academic Writing by Patricia Goodson

If you don’t care about vague tips and vaguer theory, consider spending some time with this book. Its main advantage is that it doesn’t just give you suggestions on how to improve your writing, but supplies you with specific, down-to-earth exercises and activities aimed at helping you achieve your goals and increase your productivity. In addition to that, the author offers a number of real-life examples to illustrate her points.

On Writing by Stephen King

Although this book doesn’t deal with academic texts per se, no list of books dedicated to writing is going to be complete without this classic work. King may be speaking primarily about writing fiction, but his advice is mostly universal and applies just as well to academic texts.

Of course, just reading any of these books won’t automatically improve your writing but if you take what you read to heart and start practicing it, any of them can do you a world of good.