For better academic writing, cut filler text
The student community has changed slowly, but substantially, since I was a student. Students appear to work harder now, and are more organised. They seem more numerate on average, and — gratifyingly — much more open to learning quantitative methods, my main area of teaching.
In all, students appear much more attuned to what it is they need to do to do well. Explicit instructions are easier to provide for technical work. Students are equally keen to have explicit guidelines regarding writing. The need to write grammatically is easy to communicate, and we can correct simple errors straightforwardly when grading. It is more difficult for university teachers to be prescriptive about what counts as good style, which seems more subjective. This is a problem, because style matters.
Academic performance is still largely down to how well we can write, even for more technical subjects. We know good style when we see it. Being able to write precisely and readably about what we did, why, and what we found out is a great strength. Academic work is bound up with communication of our findings, and persuasion of the sceptical.
Getting the right balance between precision and persuasion is a challenge. Too much attention to precision may make writing feel convoluted, while too much attention to persuasion may lead us to oversell weak findings, or leave readers with the wrong impression, whether intentionally or not. The traditional way of learning the balance is through experience — writing many essays. Students nowadays are increasingly keen to learn the formula from the very beginning, which requires a teaching response.
Schoolteachers rightly encourage good writing, and provide guidance geared towards secondary school assessments. This can lead students to identify as being a ‘good writer’ before university. But those who master styles that work well in school exams risk sticking too long with a style that is less effective in higher education. One result is the inexorable rise of the phrase ‘in this essay, I shall’ in university assessments.
University teachers can help students a great deal by being explicit about why good writing matters, and giving clear examples. However, so much academic writing is itself obscure, which mixes the signals we send, and reduces our credibility. And in our everyday communication — emails and whatnot — we lack time to edit, and may slide into jargon and wordiness.
University teachers also struggle with explicit advice because we are not language specialists. We have usually forgotten how we formed our own styles, and when trying to remember, we are prone to self-serving biases.
The academic publishing system can also encourage bad writing: one piece of analysis suggests that journal articles are becoming less readable over time. Use of jargon may reflect lower confidence and an overriding need to be precise, especially in academic disciplines where there is less internal consensus about what particular terms mean, and fewer shared norms as to what is good work. Equally, the work may demand care and precision in terminology.
I haven’t cracked the puzzle myself. But I know I feel better after a good round of revision, cutting filler text as far as possible. Reading George Orwell on writing is also a cleansing experience after writing a wordy first draft, or after a period of academic reading.
Orwell’s advice is bracing. Bad writing is writing that is stale and imprecise. It uses overused metaphors, and word salad — such as ‘rendered obsolete’ over ‘ended’. Bad writing features filler text replacing simple conjunctions: ‘with respect to’, ‘having regard to’, ‘the fact that’, ‘in view of’.
Orwell argued that bad writing is also often pretentious, with superfluous use of words like phenomenon, element, objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, and utilize.
Orwell concluded with a set of rules:
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These boil down to using efficient, simple and direct language wherever possible. For students and academics alike, a quick way to implement his advice is to cut filler text.
While ‘killing our darlings’ line by line can be laborious, it pays off by respecting the reader’s time and attention, and more instrumentally too. Being as efficient as possible buys attentional space and goodwill — goodwill we can draw down when we really need to use technical language.
Having a more austere style may also make our argument more credible when we do drop a little colour into the palette, at the point when we need to make a section more readable or memorable. We can’t always strip writing to the absolute bare bones.
Ultimately, it’s a question of judgement. While Orwell outlined rules of good writing, he reminded us that we should ‘[b]reak any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous’. Of course, the purpose of academic writing is to inform rather than entertain: students and academics alike should strive for precision, and to be measured in their claims. But the best of academic writing is sensitive to the readers’ needs, and when they need pictures painting in our minds.
It is most useful to think of good writing as something that we do — and that we can always improve a piece of writing further — rather than what we are. Writing is improved by reading, and perfected by editing. Attentive reading and habitual editing gives definition to academic writing, and allows writers to define a scholarly, yet authentic, voice.
Twelve steps for a step-change in writing quality
- Read essays and novels by great stylists
George Orwell — Essays (2000); George Eliot — Middlemarch (1871–2); Paul Auster — The Art of Hunger (1997); Zadie Smith — Intimations (2020); Hilary Mantel — Mantel Pieces (2021)
2. Read social science journalism and academic work by some great social science communicators
Tom Clark, Contributing Editor, Prospect Magazine; Rob Ford, University of Manchester and UK in a Changing Europe; Pippa Norris, Harvard University; Paula Surridge, University of Bristol and UK in a Changing Europe; John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times
3. Read more on the craft of writing
George Orwell (1946), ‘Politics and the English Language’, Horizon (1946), as linked in the essay above. A classic piece on how complex or stale language can be used to defend the politically-indefensible by distracting, overwhelming or boring readers: ‘the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language’.
Harry Frankfurt (2005), On Bullshit (Princeton University Press). A short, important book by a leading moral philosopher on how bullshit differs from straightforward lying, and why there is so much of it about.
Patrick Dunleavy (2014), ‘Write for Research’ blog on the importance of the paragraph as the building-block of academic writing, and how to construct a great paragraph.
Karl Popper letter to Raymond Aron (1970), on how complexity of language masks vacuity: ‘I have translated some of [Adorno and Habermas’] sentences into simple German. It turns out to be either trivial or tautological or sheer pretentious nonsense’.
5. Work through the University of Manchester Academic phrasebank.
6. Consult Professor Inger Newburn’s ‘Thesis Whisperer’ blog for research students on academic writing, Australian National University.
7. Check the readability of your draft with the application Hemingway.
8. For students at my university, sign up to the University of Sheffield 301 Academic Skills Centre digital workshop on academic writing.
9. Use Scrivener, a productivity-boosting writing software with a 30-day free trial period.
10. Use Google Drive or Dropbox to back up work automatically.
11. Create a schedule for your work using a template: https://create.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/schedules
12. Use the Pomodoro technique to turn a longer writing task into a series of short sprints, with breaks in between your bursts of writing — a great way to complete a longer project efficiently.
