Suggested Resources
For further assistance with preparing your manuscript, general style questions, and other aspects of publishing or writing, our editors recommend the following books and resources :
On getting published:
Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, by William Germano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. For scholarly books.
Thinking like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get it Published, by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. For commercial books.
On writing and preparing manuscripts:
Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors, ed. Beth Luey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Handbook for Academic Authors, 4th ed., Beth Luey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. The basic style guide for most scholarly publishing. Some disciplines (e.g., the Modern Language Association) have their own style guides, which may also be consulted.
The Elements of Style, 4th ed., by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999. A classic little book on clear, concise, writing.
Revising Prose, 4th ed., by Richard Lanham. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. Comes highly recommended for writers needing to tighten and polish their manuscript. Suggests "The Paramedic Method" of revision.
The Elements of Legal Style, 2nd ed., by Bryan A. Garner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Maybe you don't think of lawyers as practitioners of clear writing style. That's exactly why they need this excellent guide, which can also be of benefit to anyone in a field that uses jargon (thus, all of academia).
