"Intrinsic motivations like joy and fascination can and should propel our writing--all the more so when extrinsic rewards seem few. In this generous, generative book, Helen Sword offers us ample encouragement and insight on how, even in difficult times, we can dare to seek delight." --Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape "At last, a writing guide that doesn't scold or ridicule, but treats the challenge of writing well as a form of pleasurable mastery." --Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century "Sword is the prophetic voice crying out in academia's wilderness: 'Write with pleasure! It can be done! Come and see!' Through enviable prose, enticing poems, and elegant illustrations, readers see the pleasure, feel it, apply it to their own writing and, when all is read and done, cannot resist repenting." --Patricia Goodson, Texas A&M University "Helen Sword has been helping me improve my writing for more than a decade. In Writing with Pleasure , she finally taught me how to love it--and keep loving it. If you want to make writing a painless habit, this book is for you." --Inger Mewburn, Australian National University " Writing with Pleasure --itself a pleasure in the reading--opens exciting vistas onto the great expanse of writing: the aesthetics in the written, the corporeality of the writer, the emotions felt for and from writing.

This original and inventive book charts new territory for anyone who writes and for everyone who researches writing." --Daniel Shea, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.