This is a follow-up to a previous post, where I mused about what counts as "good" and "bad" writing. I thought it might be interesting to try to document some of the things that I find myself explicitly thinking about when trying to write something important enough to warrant more care than just catching typos. I'm sure that such checks are common to a lot of people who write often.
Keep structures parallel
Although I don't always catch them initially, I check to make sure that I am using structures that are parallel when creating lists. In other words, instead of this:
Many things can influence your teaching style, such as what you are teaching, the time of day, and are you familiar with the student population.
do something like this:
Many things can influence your teaching style, such as the focus of the lesson, the time of day, and your familiarity with the student population.
Keeping things parallel helps avoid grammatical weirdness and makes the writing flow a little better.
Avoid ambiguous pronouns
This is still a work in progress for me. Pronouns are incredibly useful in keeping sentences from getting overly clunky by repeating a huge noun phrase over and over:
(Clunky) Students who have learning styles that differ from your teaching style may have trouble keeping up with the class because students who have learning styles that differ from your teaching style will require extra cognitive effort to be successful.
(Better) Students who have learning styles that differ from your teaching style may have trouble keeping up with the class because they require extra cognitive effort to be successful.*
But there are times when they can become ambiguous or even confusing. [Note that the previous sentence could have been, perhaps more clearly, written as: But there are times when pronouns can become ambiguous or even confusing.] Adding additional words to a sentence or moving sentences around during the editing process can sometimes cause the referential integrity to "break" or to be less clear than it was when the text was first written.
Vary sentence length
Although it is common for academic writing to be quite verbose, slogging through pages and pages of a never ending river of paragraph-long sentences can be exhausting. The text needs to breathe. This doesn't mean that long sentences are bad and should be avoided at all costs. Rather, there should be a variety of sentence lengths scattered throughout the manuscript. Resist the need to "embellish" short sentences with additional words just because they don't seem "long enough" for "academic" writing. Clarity of thought, not density of text, is the goal.
Don't reference the entire field (unless warranted)
This may be something that was more common when I was in graduate school than now, but it is a bit of a pet peeve (perhaps because I can't do it the way others can). It is great to have an encyclopedic command of the literature, but stringing several lines worth of references to every single statement usually just makes the text harder to read. I'm talking about things like this:
Students who have learning styles (Academic, 2007; Bigwig, 2011a; Bigwig, 2011b; Bigwig, 2015a; Bigwig, 2015b; Bigwig, 2015c, Bigwig & Student, 2016; Bigwig & Colleague, 2017; Bigwig & Mentor, 1983; Colleague, 2020; Colleague, 2022; Mentor, 1962; Obligatory, 1977; Student, 2018; Zeitgeist, 2022; also see Kirkum, 2009) that differ from your teaching style (Celebrity, 2005; Heavyweight, 2009a; Heavyweight, 2009b; Hotshot, 2017; Hotshot & Celebrity, 2019; Somebody, 2013; Somebodyelse, 1992; Kirkum, 2008) may have trouble keeping up with class (Notable, 2003; Notable & Somebody, 2004; Notable & Student, 2005) because they require extra cognitive effort (Hotshot, 1999; Personage, 2000; VIP, 2013; Kirkum, 2009) to be successful.
Of course, there may be a legitimate need to refer specifically to many individual studies, such as to counter the argument that there has been little research into idea X, for example. But if you are just trying to prove that you have done the reading, it is probably better to do that in the strength of your argument rather than the size of your bibliography. I prefer to just list an example or two if I want give a nod to a general area of the literature ("...... learning styles (e.g., Academic, 2007; Bigwig, 2011)....").
Don't try to cram everything in
This is another tough one. When we were high school students, it seemed like we were always trying figure out how to make our term papers "long enough" to meet whatever requirements the teacher had set. Page limits were like unachievable goals that you would give anything to reach. ("How could anyone ever right ten whole pages about <insert topic here>?")
Once you are reporting on your own work, however, it is a completely different story. ("How could anyone ask me to boil down my masterwork to a mere ten pages?") This is particularly true if you are trying to create a paper out of a longer manuscript such as a dissertation. Of course, it is possible to publish things piecemeal, but those pieces need to be able to stand on their own.
One of the best pieces of advice I heard is to keep the literature review extremely short. Your job is to put the study in context, not to recapitulate the history of the field. Get right into the meat of what you did, pulling relevant literature into the methods and results sections as needed. That may not be the appropriate approach for a dissertation itself, but for a journal article or chapter, your reader will likely thank you.
*The concept of learning style as it is usually discussed does not have much support in the research literature.
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