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Academic writing 2: Five tips to make your paper concise and clear

Hey, it’s Dr. Liu here with Better LIFE Research TIPS. Today I want to talk about how to write to make your paper clear and concise.

Be clear and concise are top priorities for academic writing. In academic writing, our readers are usually professionals who are looking for useful information for their work. They are not reading for fun, or to kill time. Instead, they want to save time and get their job done quickly. Think about ourselves. When we conduct literature review, we often need to read many papers, and we really hope we can grasp the main idea of these papers within minimum time. Reading a wordy and confusing paper is a headache. So, when it is our turn to write a paper, we should learn to be kind to our reader. By putting clarity and conciseness as top priorities, we not only give our reader a favor, but also make our paper more valuable. Our ideas in the paper will have more chance to be recognized and be cited.

Writing clearly and concisely is not easy, especially for students who has a formed habit to write unnecessary long text because of their long term consciousness of having to meet length requirements in their writing assignments, or because they want look more sophisticated than they actually are. In the real world academic writing, we should get rid of this habit. We should learn to be economical with the words we use. Imaging you need to pay $10 for each word you use. Would you still write your paper in the same way? We do not want to write a lot but say little. In addition to be concise, we also want to maximize clarity of our writing. The goal is to allow our reader to skim our paper and grasp the main idea within minimum time. We want to cut all the redundant words, and avoid all the ambiguous words. There are two golden rules here. First, If there is a possibility our writing can be misinterpreted, we should revise it. Second, if a word or a phrase can be removed or shortened without losing meaning, we should do it. Generally, short sentences and short paragraphs are preferred. Typically, it is a good practice to keep most of our sentences to be less than 30 words, and most of our paragraphs to be less than 300 words. A sentence longer than 4 lines, or a paragraph occupying a whole page is not reader friendly, and should be avoided when possible.

Be concise and clear is not only about using less word, but is also about using a clear structure to allow our reader to catch our idea in less time. After we cut all the redundant words, replace all the ambiguous words, and correct all the grammar mistakes, there are still something we can do to improve the clarity and conciseness of our writing. Here are the 5 tips.

First, for each paragraph in our paper, always start with the topic sentence. Each paragraph should just have one main idea, and it should be clearly stated at the 1st sentence of the paragraph. You may think this is too formulaic, because many experienced writer can put the topic sentence somewhere else and still make it very impressive. But if we really put clarity and conciseness as our top priorities, instead of style, we should do this, especially for beginning writers. When we skim other people’s paper, we want to identify their topic sentences as quick as possible. Putting the topic sentence at the 1st sentence will not only help our reader to save time, but also will help ourselves in the writing process by making our ideas clearer. By doing this, if we put the 1st sentence of each paragraph together, it will read like an abstract.

Second, when comparing and listing different items, always use parallel structure. Parallel structures keep the compared items in the same grammatical form. It adds balance, rhythm, and consistency to sentences, so reader can easily follow, and relate the compared items to each other. For example, we may say, we want our students to initiate their own learning, be creative problem-solvers, and think independently. This is not parallel. To make it parallel, the sentence could be revised as, we want our students to be self-motivated learners, creative problem-solvers, and independent thinkers.

Third, use active voice instead of passive voice unless we have a good reason not to do so. Generally, active voice is less wordy, more clear, and it provides more complete information. Some writers prefer passive voice simply because they want to remove human factor in writing, or when the actor seems not important. But for others, these reasons may not be good enough to choose passive voice over active voice. To me, passive voice should be used only when it improves the clarity of our writing, for example, it can be used to keep the subject and focus consistent throughout a passage, or to keep a parallel structure as stated in the 2nd tip.

The 4th tip is to minimize the use of adverbs. Adverbs are words that modify verbs and adjectives. They are usually used when the writer is afraid they are not expressing clearly by using the verb or the adjective alone. In academic writing, adverbs such as “very, really, basically, absolutely, extremely” should be avoided. We should try our best to replace these adverbs with evidence or data, or we can remove them by using a more accurate verb or adjective. For example, instead of “very clear”, we may say “obvious”; instead of “really large”, we may say “huge”; instead of “absolutely sure”, we may say “certain”. Also, we may prefer to use affirmative words instead of “not something”. For example, instead of “not positive”, we may say “negative”; instead of “not often”, we may say “rarely”.

The 5th tip is to avoid turning verbs into nouns. Verbs are generally less wordy, more clear and powerful, and they can move the writing along more quickly. For example, instead of “conduct a investigation”, we’d rather say “investigate”; instead of “provide a review”, we’d rather say “review”; instead of “there is a common assumption that”, we’d rather say “many people assume”. Also, to maximize clarity, the subject and the verb should be put next to each other whenever it is possible. And that concludes our 5 tips to make your paper clear and concise.

Thanks for watching, I am Dr. Liu with research tips for the underdogs. Happy new year, 2019. Until next time, enjoy a fresh start for a better life.

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