Skip to content


Air & Light & Time & Space – How Successful Academics Write (Helen Sword) – my reading notes

I’ll be the first one to confess that, after having loved Helen Sword’s “Stylish Academic Writing”, I was very much looking forward to reading Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (also published, like her previous book, by Harvard University Press).

Literature Road Mapping

And I’ll also be honest in voicing (like with Paul Silvia’s “Write It Up!”) my disappointment. I expected more from this book. As I have said, it’s NOT a bad book. On the contrary, it’s definitely worth buying, reading and keeping on your shelf. I just wish Sword’s book had been as good as her previous one, Stylish Academic Writing.

I write at 4 or 4:30 in the morning, but not everyone can do that, nor are they efficient doing that. Some people are (as I used to be) night owls.

This is my final assessment of ALTS and SAW.

Hopefully my reading notes will be useful to my readers!

You can share this blog post on the following social networks by clicking on their icon.

Posted in academia, writing.

Tagged with , , .


One Response

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Which “writing” book is best suited for me? A map of the literature based on a re-read of Helen Sword’s ALTS – Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD linked to this post on August 16, 2019

    […] no clue how to answer that question. A recent re-read and reconsideration of Helen Sword’s Air, Light, Time and Space made me think about how what we know about a certain field is contingent (dependent) upon what we […]



Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.



shares