Discover Helen's words

A literary scholar by training, Helen pivoted mid-career to “writing about writing.” Here you’ll find her single-authored and edited books as well as a selection of books to which she has contributed articles or chapters. Helen’s much-anticipated new book Writing with Pleasure is available now.

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Helen Sword, Writing with Pleasure

Writing should be a pleasurable challenge, not a painful chore. Writing with Pleasure empowers academic, professional, and creative writers to reframe their negative emotions about writing and reclaim their positive ones.

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Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write

Celebrating the intellectual values of “air & light & time & space,” this inspirational book offers individuals and institutions a customizable blueprint for rebuilding their writing habits from the ground up.

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Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing

For scholars and students frustrated by disciplinary conventions, Stylish Academic Writing provides imaginative, practical pointers for making academic articles and books a pleasure to read—and to write.

Helen Sword, The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose

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Helen Sword, The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose

Is your writing flabby or fit? The Writer's Diet will help you energize your writing, boost your verbal fitness, and strip unnecessary padding from your prose. Check out the Writer’s Diet website and come prepared to put your writing through a workout!

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Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, & Steven Yao (eds), Pacific Rim Modernisms

Reflecting a range of scholarly perspectives, the 14 essays in this volume explore how writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Pacific Rim have contributed to Modernist culture, literature, and identity.

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Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism

Ghostwriting Modernism documents the vexed relationship between Modernist literature and popular spiritualism, showing how Modernism itself was ineluctably ghostwritten.

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Helen Sword, Engendering Inspiration

Tracing conflicting tropes of passivity and power in the works of three Modernist poets, Engendering Inspiration shows how each of them negotiated the fundamentally gendered paradoxes of inspiration.

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Sandy Farquhar & Esther Fitzpatrick (eds), Innovations in Narrative and Metaphor: Methodologies and Practices

This collection of innovative approaches to using metaphor in research and teaching includes a chapter by Helen Sword, “Snowflakes, Splinters, and Cobblestones: Metaphors for Writing.”

Susan Carter & Deborah Laurs (eds), Developing Research Writing: A Handbook for Supervisors and Advisors

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Susan Carter & Deborah Laurs (eds), Developing Research Writing: A Handbook for Supervisors and Advisors

A boon for anyone who supervises PhD students or other researchers, this edited collection of expert advice includes a chapter by Helen Sword, “Giving Feedback on Style.”

Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence

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Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence

Best known as a novelist and essayist, D. H. Lawrence was also an accomplished poet, as documented in Helen Sword’s comprehensive essay “Lawrence’s Poetry.”

Annette Debo & Lara Vetter, Approaches to Teaching H.D.'s Poetry and Prose

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Annette Debo & Lara Vetter, Approaches to Teaching H.D.'s Poetry and Prose

Helen Sword posits the Modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) as a cyber-poet before her time in her essay “Hilda Digital: Teaching H.D. in Cyberspace.”

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Main image credit - Paper collage by Helen Sword