Acknowledgements. A note about academic writing conventions. Introduction. Part I. 1. How to write: some basics for shorter writing tasks. 2. Doing research: a basic method for longer projects. 3. Using libraries and the Internet. 4. Scholarly documentation: citing sources. 5. Using illustrations: notated music, pictures, tables, and other visual representations. Part II. 6. Language and numbers. 7. Some musical terms and phrases. 8. Sources and research tools. 9. Citations I: The printed word and its electronic equivalents. 10. Citations II: Musical sources. 11. Citations III: Other sources.