Book Reviews
Air & Light & Time & Space: HowSuccessful Academics Write
Helen Sword, Harvard University Press (2017) (266 pages).
ISBN 978-0-674-73770-9 $24.95 USD
Reviewed by Julia Kimura
Mukogawa Women’s University
An instructor in my graduate program suggested I read Helen Sword’s book Stylish
Academic Writing (2012) because it would help me with writing my dissertation.
I devoured the book and found it to be tremendously helpful. Fortunately for me
and other academics who struggle with writing, Sword has written a new book,
Air & Light &Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (2017). The firstpart of the title comes from a poem by the same name by Charles Bukowski.
He described the ideal working environment for writers and other artists whocrave an ideal workspace. Sadly, as many readers of OnCUE Journal will agree,
our teaching loads and administrative duties rob us of valuable writing time, andteaching during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought additional challenges.
However, many productive writers and researchers manage to produce great
works in less ideal environments and circumstances than our own. Sword does
not provide a blueprint for academic success, but through her tips, the reader canconstruct a customizable building plan. (Individual results will vary.)
For this book, she asked researchers across various disciplines around theworld about their writing habits. For some researchers that Sword talked to,English was their first language. For others, it was their second or even third.
From these researchers’ responses, Sword gleaned habits that other researchers in167

Kimuraany discipline can adopt when writing.
Thanks to Sword’s empirical approach, she was able to put several persistentmyths to rest. One of which is the erroneous belief that academics must write
conservatively and conventionally or risk professional failure. Sword’s conclusion
was that there is no perfect one-size-fits-all approach. For example, some prolific
writers prefer “binge-writing” for hours on end, others prefer “snack writing” forshort snatches when they have some time.
Sword took a no-nonsense and empirical approach to gathering data. First,
she surveyed 1,223 participants in writing workshops she had conducted over
the years. Three topics that were covered in both surveys and interviews wereabout learning to write, daily habits, and emotions related to writing. Responses
from workshop participants formed a baseline of what novice writers looked like.
Next, over a period of four years, in addition to conducting these surveys, Swordinterviewed 100 exemplary researchers who work in a variety of disciplines,
including biology, history, economics and public affairs. She comparedthese experts’ responses to those of the aforementioned novice workshop
participants. She weaved these researchers’ stories with her own experiences andoffers solutions to troubles researchers face with writing, such as dealing withperfectionism or having to write in a second or third language.
The book has four parts representing a different type of writing habit:
behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional. By artisanal habits, Sword means
how much researchers polish and tinker as they write. Examples of artisanal
habits that Sword recommended include learning to write by teaching it toa mentee or reading about writing. Social habits can include writing in thecompany of others, which we can do in-person, or virtually, online. One helpful
online community I have discovered is Focusmate.com, a website that pairs users
with others around the world who want to commit to working on a task for 50minutes.
Each part of Sword’s book has three chapters covering aspects of these typesof habits. Each chapter contains stories from writers and these descriptions
illustrate how to incorporate healthy writing habits. Each chapter ends with a listof practical strategies for the reader to try out. For developing good behavioral
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Air & Light & Time & Space, OnCUE 14(1), pages 167-170

habits, for example, Sword recommends creating an attractive workspace. For
developing good artisanal habits, she recommends L1 and L2 users exchange
manuscripts so that L1 users can offer L2 users support in English-language
writing, and in exchange, L2 users can give L1 users critical feedback on content.
For developing good social habits, she suggests forming a writing group. For
developing good emotional habits, she recommends some books that describe
the pleasurable aspects of writing.
The book has numerous strengths. The biggest strength is that Sword offers
her readers hope. I have struggled with many aspects of writing, and after reading
Sword’s book, I now feel confident that I have more arrows in my quiver that canhelp me at least marginally improve behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional
aspects of writing as I complete my dissertation research. Through Sword’s
accounts of interviews with “successful” researchers, we can expect that any
reader can benefit from incorporating effective writing habits into their writing
practice. In this way, I feel that readers can work steadily towards developing
good writing habits and eventually become more effective writers.
If I had to identify one weakness of Sword’s book, however, it would be thatshe places an unnecessary emphasis on positive emotions. In Chapter 10: The
pleasure principle, she states that the 100 interview participants (the exemplaryresearchers) were more likely than survey participants (the experienced butnot expert writers) to feel only positive emotions when writing. Expecting
to experience positive emotions is unrealistic because human beings cannot
realistically expect to feel good all the time when writing. Writing shouldbe engaging; it does not have to be fun. When experiencing flow, we enter “amental state of extremely rewarding concentration [...] between frustration andboredom” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). This state is characterized by the absenceof emotion. In other words, it does not have to be fun to be fun. However, wecan take Sword’s comparison of experts and novices to mean that as writers gain
mastery, they might learn to enjoy the process more.
The book need not be read from cover to cover. Readers can take thediagnostic quiz in the introduction and evaluate which types of habits todevelop. There are four questions that correspond to the four types of habits
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Kimuracovered in the book. Sword provides descriptors and readers rate themselves oneach category on a scale of one to ten.
I recommend this book to researchers who struggle with good writing habits.
Additionally, foreign language teachers appreciate the social nature of language
learning. We know that our students learn a foreign language by communicatingwith others, and thus we can easily extrapolate and remember that the foreign
language teacher can improve their writing by writing with and for others as well.
The section on social habits would be most useful for foreign language teachersin particular, but modeling any positive writing habits might help the foreign
language teacher feel empathy towards their students and ideally, teachers will beable to become role models to students.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity, flow and the psychology of discovery andinvention. Harper Collins.
Sword, H. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Harvard University Press.
Sword, S. (2017). Air & light & time & space: How successful academics write.
Harvard University Press.

Author Bio

Julie Kimura currently teaches pharmacy and pharmaceutical science majors theirrequired English courses at Mukogawa Women’s University. She is also a PhD
candidate at Temple University, where she is conducting research on non-Japanesewomen in the workers’ rights movement. jkimura@mukogawa-u.ac.jp
Received: July 20, 2020
Accepted: April 16, 2021

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