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

Confronted with the soul-sucking ash-clouded morass euphemistically known as scholarly writing, developmental editor Pamela Haag in her new book Revise: The Scholar-Writer’s Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting Your Manuscript opts for an optimism quixotic enough to make a saint weep. In these pages, she presents her target audience with a series of eloquently-phrased bits of common sense designed to turn the impenetrable junk that is most academic prose into something readable through the miracle of mindful revision.

“In the revision stage,” she writes, “you’ll remember that you’re not just a scholar. You’re a writer.”

The point being: writers face an audience. They’re no longer beetling through records and collating information; they’re now at the point that most scholars blithely omit: the point where they transform all that raw information into a narrative anybody would voluntarily read. The back-bencher new release list of every academic press in the English-speaking world - not their half-dozen most-vetted top releases but almost literally everything else - is heavily silted with such unreadable junk, and it’s oddly endearing that those bottomlessly boring books have a champion in Haag, who urges readers to share her belief that careful revision can save the day:

Writing and revision are different skills. Revision is the process by which a manuscript evolves from being author-centric to being reader-centric. The manuscript changes from a conversation that you’re having on the page with yourself, your dissertation adviser, the archive, or an imagined intellectual foe into a book that many can read and savor.

The idea of anybody savoring some of the sullenly opaque jargon-choked blocks of tedium any reader of scholarly literature has encountered over the years seems a dream too far, but Haag is adamant. She’s convinced that if readers embrace her own favoring of “evergreen and natural language” they can transform even the most recalcitrant text. And she’s as touchy when it comes to that “jargon-choked” part as she should be, since it’s the bricolage of private scholarly patois that’s the main stopping point of so much of this type of writing. “Scholar-writers legitimately use specialized theory, language, shorthand, and esoteric concepts,” she allows. “But problems of style and readability have long gotten excused, or camouflaged, by this rationalization.” 

In the pages of Revise, that camouflage is stripped away. Haag presents a long array of scholarly-writing examples - enough to give veteran reviewers PTSD-style flashes of visceral panic - and immediately corrects them into clearer, more readable prose. The transformation happens so often, so regularly, that even the most cynical reader will come away thinking that maybe there’s hope after all. 

Anybody working - or re-working - the kind of scholarly-nonfiction text Haag is concentrating on here should read her book before they type one turgid word more. And what’s more: so should all other writers. The book you save may be your own.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.