It is safe to say that Joe Moran, professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, is a writer born and true.

Although he doesn¡¯t take much care of the rest of his body, he tells us in his new book, First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing¡­and Life (Viking), he does ¡°look after the parts of it I need to write. I stretch and squeeze my fingers, giving them miniature gym workouts, so I don¡¯t injure them from repetitive strain. My right shoulder and arm get stiff ¨C an industrial injury I have heard called ¡®mouse arm¡¯ ¨C and so I knead them with a knobbly self-massage stick¡­If I ever trip over a loose paving stone, I must remember (being left-handed) to break my fall with my right arm¡­writing sentences is how I live, not merely exist.¡±

While reluctant to be too prescriptive, Moran has set out to produce what he calls a ¡°style guide by stealth¡± and ¡°a love letter to the sentence¡±, based on the premise that ¡°the whole point of a sentence is that it gives us a voice ¨C one as unique and inimitable, we hope, as our actual voices¡±. Very little academic writing, of course, is so lovingly crafted or aspires to such high ideals.

Moran has already distilled some key points into an earlier feature article in ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ (¡°Limber up your write brain¡±, 4 October), yet it seemed worthwhile to flag up a few more.

³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ

One kind of dull academic prose, in Moran¡¯s view, is full of phrases such as ¡°of course¡± and ¡°to be sure¡± ¨C in order to ¡°inoculate the writer against the shameful disease of naivety¡±. Yet this style ends up feeling ¡°just too watertight, too neurotic about purging itself of inconsistencies. Rather like sealing a boat¡¯s hull with black tar, making prose unsinkable makes it ugly. It has sold its life and voice in return for that dubious virtue, invulnerability.¡±

³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ

More generally, Moran points to a ¡°flawed premise of the academic essay, which is that the writer must pretend to care¡±. So we learn that something is ¡°deeply problematic¡± or ¡°more crucial than ever before¡± or that ¡°a debate is long overdue¡±. In their famous 1953 paper in Nature, James Watson and Francis Crick announced their discovery of the double helix form of DNA with the phrase: ¡°This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.¡± In this particular case, argues Moran, the closing phrase is ¡°so coy, so inadequate to the article¡¯s momentous findings, that it almost swaggers¡±. Generally, such dying falls amount to ¡°adding words to make the sentence longer, bulking it out with platitude, playing the game ¨C the one that tells you to pretend to care about the answer to someone else¡¯s question, and to come up with a fixed number of words in response to this set task¡±. If much academic writing is unnecessarily dull, and it surely is, there is much to be learned from this highly entertaining book.