Our Go-To Resources for Writing and Editing

These are the texts we’ve long leaned on to develop writing and revision strategies. You may find them helpful as you write and revise your work.

You may also be wondering, how do I find an academic editor? This episode of The Editing Podcast is a great place to start.

1. Revising on the sentence and paragraph level

Pamela Haag, Revise: The Scholar’s Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting Your Manuscript (Yale University Press, 2021)

Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012) 

2. Building paragraphs that work

Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2014), especially Chapter 8 on the “uneven U.”

3. Writing in dialogue with your sources

Joseph Harris, Rewriting: How To Do Things with Text (Utah State University Press, 2006)

4. Crafting a successful book proposal and manuscript

Laura Portwood-Stacer, The Book Proposal Book (Princeton University Press, 2021)

Laura Portwood-Stacer, Make Your Manuscript Work: A Guide to Developmental Editing for Academic Writers (Princeton University Press, 2025)