The secret to academic writing is ....

The secret of academic writing is, of course, TONS and TONS of melodramatic pathos!

Two quotes from my (now completed!) introduction for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival:

"Much too much Society verse, I fear, has suffered an even unkinder fate than this—surviving, if it survives at all, only in damp basements, dusty attics, and long forgotten old desk drawers." 

"Still, generally speaking, most unpublished poetry finds only one fate. It disappears quietly into the night: unknown, unloved, unrecognized."

As I put the finishing touches on this sucker, too, I've been reflecting on what makes a final-stage proofreading successful. One thing I think about is reading speed: as an academic, you read papers much faster than you do when composing (or revising) them, and I've found that this changes the actual phrasing a writer should use -- for instance, I tend to remove lots of qualifying phrases since, during a speed-read, I realize that the reader will probably remember the qualifiers from a paragraph or two earlier.

But also, I pay attention to ..... well, boring prose. Look at the next two sentences (the second is the revision.)

• "This voracious private reading helps explain Anderson’s unusual status as the vanguard poet in the demotic branch of the Revival—a situation even more remarkable given that he began his career long before Tolkien made northern medieval Europe a cornerstone of popular fantasy."

• "This voracious private reading helps explain Anderson’s unusual status as the modern Revival’s vanguard poet in the demotic branch—a situation all the more remarkable since Anderson’s medievalism arose well before Tolkien ever became a light in the eyes of American genre fandom."

The first sentence, of course, is perfectly acceptable academic prose, and honestly, I could have left it as it and got it published just fine. (And saved my myself several days' worth of revisions just like this.)

But I wanted more. In the first half of both sentences, the original and the revision, they're mostly the same ... I just changed the rhythm in  sentence #2's first half slightly. But the second half of Sentence #1, however, is just plain dull. The word "cornerstone" is mildly interesting, since it connotes importance .... but only slightly. The phrase "that he began his," though, is thoroughly lame, since it's a string of mostly grammatical words that simply slow down the reader's acquisition of more substantial nouns and verbs. So, what I did was revise all that. "Anderson's medievalism" is a more concrete set of nouns to use .... and, of course, "a light in the eyes of the American genre fandom" is much niftier in terms of imagery than "cornerstone," although both say effectively the same thing. 

Most readers, honestly, probably won't consciously notice the difference as they're reading. Still, I spend insane amounts of time on revision stuff like this. All told, hopefully it'll make the reading process more enjoyable .... and of course faster, since the meaning is so much more intuitive with the better phrasing.