Eighteen Theses on Good and Bad Academic Writing

Or Historians and Their Texts (Plus Some Housekeeping After)

I. The quantity of anxiety expressed about bad academic writing probably doesn’t have much of a relationship to the quantity of bad writing actually being produced by academics.

II. Most bad academic writing is bad because its authors are bad writers.

III. Most bad academic writers would continue to write bad texts even if they were writing for a public a…