If you can incorporate concision, cohesion and grace into each paper you write, then good grades are sure to follow. This is relatively unimportant; in academic writing, clarity takes precedence over grammatical correctness. Specifity is the enemy of word-fog. Nominalizations are noun forms of verbswords that signal the existence of an action as opposed to the performance of an action (the job of verbs). Academic writing uses prescriptive grammar Precise words:Favor fewer precise words over numerous vague ones. That clear consistency allows us to devote more of our brain power to recalling technical terms (like immunomodulatory) and comprehending the key ideas. In these two sentences, the character is a belief rather than a person or thing. Clarity and Coherence in Academic Writing - Routledge Sometimes, these words are necessary, but in many cases they arent. Feedback and peer review are essential parts of the academic writing process. Last semester, my essay on symbolism in Romantic poetry won a department award. She is the author of Creating a Multilingual Self: Autoethnography as Method, and co-editor of Plurilingualism in Teaching and Learning and Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity. How to Teach Writing for Clarity Better Than Anyone Else Avoid Clichs. Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices. Or worse, some students assume that theyll never produce strong papers if they do not already have some kind of inborn gift for wordsmithing. Required fields are marked *. While this sentence is grammatically correct, we have no idea whose concern its telling us about; we just know the concern exists. You might want the character to have a wordy voice, to sound like Calvins description of his papers title in the comic strip above. So your job is to simplify it for your reader wherever possible. Where do you stumble? Rhetoric refers to how meaning is overtly or subtly built into the structure of language. Academic work includes writing assignments, term papers, and dissertations. The Power of Revising 9. Writing with precision and clarity involves choosing language that communicates the intended meaning unambiguously. The sound was serpentine, a lisp like wind blown across the mouth of the smallest glass bottle. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003179092, Registered in England & Wales No. The best way to achieve clarity and concision in writing is to separate the drafting process from the revision process. When I ask clients to rewrite a sentence using the most straight-forward and simplest language possible, it sometimes takes them a few minutes to identify exactly what they were trying to say. PDF Academic Writing Style: Clarity - The University of Western Australia One of the most important things to consider in academic . The engine overheated during the first trial, Webpage with short video and exercises: ". On the other hand, complex syntactic structures which are compressed may reduce the clarity of the intended meaning, which goes against the goal of explicitness in academic writing. Make sure you are using effective topic sentences to identify your main points and to give the reader a sense of where you're going next. Thanks for reading our blob, Max! As the famous English writer George Orwell once noted. Although the focus is on academic writing, these procedures are relevant for all writing. Writers should keep their expression "Real Simple," eliminating unnecessary and repetitious words, redundant ideas, and awkward phrasing. This index makes findings topics easy and links to the most relevant page for each item. The Cleopatra example above (. Academic writing is notoriously bad, and according to experimental psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker . Encyclopdia Britannica, s.v. Clarity in writing means the ease with which a reader can understand you. Especially, Williams, Harvey, and Lanham; see other resources for full references. Producing and reading elegant writing is a pleasure, but what really matters in academic writing is precision. The idea of how much power the King had struck Parliament. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Take a look at these examples of vague writing: Vague writing often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. by Emma Charlotte - September 14, 2021 Introduction: If you are a student, then you have to do a lot of academic work. What most people really feel nostalgic about has little to do with the internal structure of 1950s families. The pages in this section provide guidance on precise, clear language for capstone writing. Cleopatra was seen as divine when she was a child. The following guidelines can help you get started. Ambiguity is a many-headed beast. The word nominalization describes this concept. Avoid complex sentences. Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. Be careful when using pronouns in discussions that include multiple entities (people, organizations, objects, etc. The scarcity of research funds for nutritional scientists means that offers by food companies to fund such research may be especially attractive. Good academic writing should flow, which means it should be easy to read with ideas logically connected to one another from one sentence to the next. Subjects are underlined and verbs are bolded. It rears its nebulous head(s) any time a reader is unable to determine with reasonable certainty the meaning of your text. Clear and concise writing does not always come easy; it takes practice and plenty of revision. Parataxis literally means to place alongside; it refers to constructions in which information is juxtaposed, leaving out the kinds of indicators we look for to understand the relationship between ideas: Although it is strongly implied in each case that the second statement is a consequence of the first, because this relationship is not explicitly stated, their relationshiptechnically remains ambiguous. This guide will help you maximise your marks by editing your work effectively. As with clarity, the benefits of concision are intellectual as well as stylistic: revising for concision forces writers to make deliberate decisions about the claims they want to make and their reasons for making them. You love writing without what? This colour variation is accompanied by large differences in flavour [3], which is one reason why the public have been slow to adopt the fruit in their diet. Developing clarity and focus in academic writing. This is where outlining your work before you start writing is most helpfulyour outline is like a map, highlighting every key point and showing the path your writing will take from introduction to conclusion. Using Figurative Language 7. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. I love writing. Product and Process Approaches to Writing 4. Clarity in Writing - Appalachian State University 2023 NOW NOVEL CC. [2] The end of the first sentence, which is new information, becomes the start of the next sentence, as the information is now familiar, or old. That being said, the writing process is actually a highly effective exercise for digesting material and developing a cohesive argument. Clarity in Writing: 7 Musts for Lucid Prose | Now Novel Say we use a simile (a comparison using like or as) to describe the snake: He pedalled hard as he whistled. The bottom line: nobody has ever been criticized for writing that is too clear. Get tailored advice from an Academic Skills adviser by booking an individual appointment, or get quick advice from one of our Academic Writing Tutors in our online drop-in sessions. You will almost certainly have to read works of authors who did not prioritize clarity and concision (or even cohesion and coherence), and thats a drag. This is why writing assignments often start something like, Drawing on Lockes narrative or Given what youve read about Darth Vaders aversion to democratic governance .. Have you ever received a text message from a friend that says, meet me later, were going out? Here, the phrase if found guilty lacks the noun it refers to. Academic writing in English has a distinctive style it is formal and uses particular language norms that you need to learn. Simplify where it makes sense to. Constructing the Thesis and ArgumentFrom the Ground Up, 4. Simply put, clarity refers to how clear something is. Academic writing tends to be more formal, requiring succinct prose rather than bullet points, and it is more about the argument than simply conveying, or describing, information. Tip #1: while clarity is comprised of numerous componentssentence structure, organization, and proper grammar, just to name a fewtheres a very easy and reliable way to double-check for clarity and that is simply to read your work out loud. While it is true that some people can produce extraordinarily elegant and graceful prose, it is also true that anyone can learn to write effectively in ways that will persuade and satisfy readers. I love writing without it I wouldnt have an outlet. A quote by the great Anton Chekhov we discussed in our monthly webinar suggests why specificity lends clarity: Dont tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. An active sentence is one where the subject is the source of the action. This common rhetorical trick is to put the part you want to emphasize at the very end of the sentence. - Christine, on Clarity in writing: 7 musts for lucid prose, Revision in writing: How to improve between drafts, Artificial intelligence for writing: 10 helpful AI uses, Writing productivity hacks: How to write more and finish, What should I write about? A number of academics, writing in academic journals and on Twitter, have suggested that LLMs could be used to streamline the writing process. The character, though, is obviously Little Red Riding Hood and the action is walking. these, those) are often enemies of clarity. As a general rule, it is clearer to use demonstrative adjectives, placing a noun after them to specify precisely what they're pointing to. Subordinating it to the larger discussionoffering context via a transitionwill help readers understand the purpose of this emerging point: To reduce contract processing times even further, training should be a monthly requirement so that all staff have an up-to-date knowledge of new regulations. When you turn a verb into a noun its called a nominalization. Arcimboldo and Snort disagree with Galtz, Pearsheimer, and Wervis insofar as these latter scholars argue that . Nominalization and Clarity: Ensuring the Right Balance in Academic Writing. 2. The more the writer chops up and mixes unlike things, the harder it becomes to follow their logic. What Is Academic Writing? Your Complete Guide | Grammarly Blog [4] New / unfamiliar information: the end of the sentence informs readers of content they did not know. Love your blob. Doing so is like driving while looking only at the few feet of the road right in front of the bumper. However, many student writers get hung up on sentence-level expression, thinking that only elegant, erudite sentences will earn top grades. Adding flow, cohesion, and coherence to your writing adds . Did the bill cause this effect in the automobile market, or did they merely occur at the same time? It is important to note that this process presupposes that we actually read the assigned readings and take notes during class lectures and discussions. 2. The original (goddess as a child, queen at eighteen, celebrity soon thereafter) effectively uses parallelism to vividly convey the dramatic shifts in Cleopatras roles and her prominence in the ancient world. The general rule introduced there holds for any writing: every word and sentence should be doing some significant work for the paper as a whole. Writing, grammar, and communication tips for your inbox.