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Academic writing is an easy target: there¡¯s so much of it, and not all of it is good. Understanding and detailing good practice is much harder to do. Zachary Foster¡¯s list of bad writing tics (¡°How not to write: 14 tips for aspiring humanities academics¡±, Opinion, 7 July) is a snide and rather clich¨¦d demolition of academic writing, most of which is uncontroversial: scare quotes, neologisms, the passive voice. However, underlying his assassination is a more political contempt. This is especially clear in the section on ¡°Agency¡±, which is not about style but, rather, kicks against the possibility that colonised or subaltern groups always subvert, adapt or have prior knowledge of imposed ideas. Don¡¯t they?

Writing is hard, and lots of our colleagues have spent their careers learning to do it well. Where can we read about their example and see it broken down into ¡°tips and tricks¡±? Let¡¯s celebrate our best academic writers, rather than just sneering as if from outside.

Isabel Davis
Birkbeck, University of London

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