Writing should be a pleasurable challenge, not a painful chore. Writing with Pleasure empowers academic, professional, and creative writers to reframe their negative emotions about writing and reclaim their positive ones. By learning how to cast light on the shadows, you will soon find yourself bringing passion and pleasure to everything you write.
Acclaimed international writing expert Helen Sword invites you to step into your 鈥淲riteSPACE鈥濃�攁 space of pleasurable writing that is socially balanced, physically engaged, aesthetically nourishing, creatively challenging, and emotionally uplifting. Sword weaves together cutting-edge findings in the sciences and social sciences with compelling narratives gathered from nearly six hundred faculty members and graduate students from across the disciplines and around the world. She provides research-based principles, hands-on strategies, and creative 鈥減leasure prompts鈥� designed to help you ramp up your productivity and enhance the personal rewards of your writing practice. Whether you鈥檙e writing a scholarly article, an administrative email, or a love letter, this book will inspire you to find delight in even the most mundane writing tasks and a richer, deeper pleasure in those you already enjoy.
Exuberantly illustrated by prizewinning graphic memoirist Selina Tusitala Marsh, Writing with Pleasure is an indispensable resource for academics, students, professionals, and anyone for whom writing has come to feel like a burden rather than a joy.
Awards and Recognition
- A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
Helen Sword is professor emerita in the School of Humanities and the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland and founder of WriteSPACE, an international virtual writing community. Her books include Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write; The Writer鈥檚 Diet; and Stylish Academic Writing. Website helensword.com Selina Tusitala Marsh is a poet, academic, and illustrator whose books include three volumes of poetry and the Mophead series of graphic memoirs.
"This book will be valuable for any writers—not only academics—who wish to experience more pleasure in their writing. Sword's engaging and personable writing style makes the book a pleasure to read."鈥�Choice Reviews
鈥淚ntrinsic motivations like joy and fascination can and should propel our writing鈥攁ll the more so when extrinsic rewards seem few. In this generous, generative book, Helen Sword offers us ample encouragement and insight on how, even in difficult times, we can dare to seek delight.鈥濃�擬argy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape
鈥淎t last, a writing guide that doesn鈥檛 scold or ridicule, but treats the challenge of writing well as a form of pleasurable mastery.鈥濃�擲teven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person鈥檚 Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
鈥淪word is the prophetic voice crying out in academia鈥檚 wilderness: 鈥榃rite with pleasure! It can be done! Come and see!鈥� Through enviable prose, enticing poems, and elegant illustrations, readers see the pleasure, feel it, apply it to their own writing and, when all is read and done, cannot resist repenting.鈥濃�擯atricia Goodson, Texas A&M University
鈥淗elen Sword has been helping me improve my writing for more than a decade. In Writing with Pleasure, she finally taught me how to love it鈥攁nd keep loving it. If you want to make writing a painless habit, this book is for you.鈥濃�擨nger Mewburn, Australian National University
鈥�Writing with Pleasure鈥攊tself a pleasure in the reading鈥攐pens exciting vistas onto the great expanse of writing: the aesthetics in the written, the corporeality of the writer, the emotions felt for and from writing. This original and inventive book charts new territory for anyone who writes and for everyone who researches writing.鈥濃�擠aniel Shea, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
