Former Oxford University Press editor Rachel Toor writes here in the Chronicle with some advice for book authors:
You have fewer than 50 pages to get the editors' attention. Your job is to make their job easier. What are you arguing? Why should anyone care? The editor is going to have to write copy to convince others at the press that it's worth publishing. Ideally, in doing so, he or she should be able to lift sentences and paragraphs from the manuscript. Your sentences and paragraphs. The introduction is where you bring the readers in; you have to entice them to come with you for the next 400 pages. (If your manuscript is 800 pages, I'm sorry, but you need to cut it.) Do you start with a declarative sentence, as if pronouncing from Mount Olympus, but say something obvious and bland? Do you make reference to complicated ideas in shorthand and cant? Is it clear to the reader, from the outset, why your topic warrants a book?
There are a zillion good ways to start a book well, and even more ways to do it badly. There are no rules, no secrets, no standard formats. * * *
Everyone knows that you have to have a good argument, do solid research, make an important contribution to one or more fields. But you also have to think about the writing. So my big insight of late is that I never thought of my authors as writers, because most of them didn't present themselves that way. That's a problem. If you are writing a book, you should think of yourself as a writer, and write accordingly.
"Think of yourself as a writer, and write accordingly." This is good advice for us legal academics. By training, we tend to focus in our writing on argument, structure and solutions. The writing itself is too often an afterthought, or something we (ok, I) think, "Oh, I'll tighten that after the first round of law review edits." But when the first round of edits comes back — months later — the last thing I want to do is go back and perform cosmetic surgery on my saggy sentences.
Of the (non-"law") books I've read recently, Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity stands out as beautifully written. Of the law review pieces I've read recently, well written are Melissa Murray's Strange Bedfellows: Criminal Law, Family Law, and the Legal Construction of Intimate Life, Ann Bartow's A Portrait of the Internet as a Young Man, and an IP work-in-progress by Eva Subotnik. I've re-read all three recently to pump me up for my own writing sessions. That's my written equivalent of playing the theme song from "Rocky" before a big workout. Gonna write now….gonna fly now…..
I have a website on clear legal writing at http://sfruehwald.com/ex.htm where I discuss these issues in detail.