Writing Tutorials

Essay Writing

By Ted Neilson
This site has been reproduced with the kind permission of Ted Neilson. His original site can be found at www.write-an-essay.com

Essay writing guidelines

The challenge in academic writing is to express complex ideas simply. Follow these guidelines to help improve your academic papers. Don't try to adopt a learned tone — your message, not your writing style, should show your knowledge and expertise.

• Use active verbs.
• Keep your sentence length under control.
• Use simple words instead of complex words.
• Avoid jargon.
• Avoid abstract terms — be as specific as you can.
• Avoid abbreviations and acronyms.
• Avoid padding.
• Use topic sentences.
• Link your ideas and paragraphs.
• Use examples to explain difficult points.

Use active verbs

Using active verbs is essential if you want to write with a direct authoritative style. Instead of using the impersonal passive verbs and third person viewpoint, you should write with strong, active verbs.

Almost every authority on writing encourages you to use active verbs. Here’s some typical advice to authors publishing research papers for The American Society for Testing Materials.

“As most everyone has agreed for some time now, use the third person in a paper not only adds nothing to scientific objectivity, it renders the paper gutless and lifeless . . . Scientists of the 19th century such as Darwin and Huxley wrote sensibly and clearly in the first person and turned out some very respectable prose. Let us begin anew . . . use active verbs.”

Look at these examples (passive and active words are in bold):

passive:

An improvement in quality has been made leading to the decision being taken to raise the standard test so a higher mark means the same success rate being accepted.

(29 words)

active:

As quality improved, the standard test rose, leading to a higher standard mark to gain the same acceptable success rate.


(20 words)

Notice the passive example sounds academic but takes an extra nine words to say the same information. It is no more objective than the alternative with active verbs. Although we naturally speak with active verbs, even when discussing academic subjects, the traditional academic writing style litters writing with unnecessary passive verbs. Any sentence can be either active or passive. It is your choice as the author.

Here’s another example:

passive:

Most writers know that copying another’s work word for word without giving the author credit is considered plagiarism. But it is often assumed that this practice is considered cheating only when long paragraphs are involved — paragraphs or whole pages. An honest paraphrase, however, is one in which the ideas of the source are stated in the writer’s own words.

(59 words)

active:

Most writers know that copying another’s work word for word without giving the author credit is plagiarism. But they assume this is cheating only when they copy long paragraphs or whole pages. An honest paraphrase, however, is one written in the writer’s own words.





(44 words)

Whatever the subject of the essay, you can write with active verbs to make your writing style more direct, clear and forceful. If there’s one piece of advice on writing style you should follow, it’s to use active verbs throughout your essays.

Keep your essay sentence length under control

Sentence length is crucial to good essay writing. Almost everything written by good writers has an average sentence length between 15 and 20 words. This does not mean writing every sentence the same length. Good writers naturally vary the length and rhythm of their sentences. They balance longer sentences with shorter ones, but they keep their average sentence length below 20 words.

Follow this advice:

• keep your average sentence length between 15 to 20 words,
• cut down long sentences, and
• vary the length of your sentences

An average of between 15 to 20 words for essays and research papers helps produce a clear and readable style. It’s the same average as well-respected publications such as New Scientist or the Economist consistently produce. Below 15 words and there’s a danger your writing will become too choppy and disjointed. As you go above the 20-word average, your document becomes more difficult to read. An average sentence length of 25 words is far too high.

Here’s an example of a 102-word paragraph with an average sentence length 34 words.

 

original

At first, Einstein faced great opposition when he came up with his radical new theory because the previous laws of motion proposed by Galileo and expanded upon by Newton had remained valid for over two hundred years. By mathematically manipulating these previous laws of motion, physicists in the nineteenth century were able to explain such phenomena as the flow of the ocean, the orbits of planets around the sun, the fall of rocks, and the random behavior of molecules in gases. However, it would not be long before the cement in the foundation of Newtonian and Galilean physics would begin to crumble.

Average Sentence Length: 34

redraft

Einstein faced great opposition with his radical theory. By mathematically manipulating these laws of motion, nineteenth-century physicists explained the flow of the ocean, the orbits of planets around the sun, the fall of rocks, and the random behavior of molecules in gases. The previous laws of motion, proposed by Galileo and expanded by Newton had remained valid for over two hundred years. However, soon the cement in the foundation of Newtonian and Galilean physics would crumble.





Average Sentence Length: 19

Make sure you do not allow long sentences — over 40 words — to creep into your writing style. Most academic writing contains too many long, even mammoth sentences. Faced with long sentences, readers often give up halfway through or forget the start of the sentence by the time they reach the end. The more words in a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. By comparison, it’s difficult to write an unclear sentence if it is short. Edit long sentences by cutting out wasted words or by breaking them into two or more shorter sentences.

Finally, you need to vary your sentences. An sentence length average of 18 words is fine, but if 90 percent of your sentences are 16, 17, 18 or 19 words long, your style will lack variety and interest. You should balance longer sentences, say up to 35 words with shorter sentences, some under five words, some phrased as direct questions, and still get an average sentence length of between 15 to 20 words.

Use simple words rather than complex words when writing an essay

Keep your writing style simple. Follow the standard rule in all editing: prefer the simpler word to the complex word. This means writing extra or more rather than additional; help rather than assistance; use rather than utilize. Although you might need specialist or technical words, depending on your subject, you should choose the simpler word instead of the more difficult word whenever you can.

Your essay should be interesting but also easy to read. As well as the advice to use the simpler word to the complex word, you can also make your essay read much better if you cut down on heavy words. The traditional advice is to cut down on three-syllable and four-syllable words.

Take this example:

This demonstrates an understanding of the history, diversity and commonality of the peoples of the nation, the reality of human interdependence, the need for global cooperation, and a multicultural perspective.

A more readable style, would be:

This shows we understand why history and common beliefs in each nation matters as across the world, people need to work together and respect their different cultural backgrounds.

Breaking the habit of using heavy-sounding words and replacing them with shorter, everyday words helps make the essay easier to read and encourages you to explain your ideas in more specific terms.

Avoid jargon when writing an essay

You should always write an essay to show your understanding of the subject. There’s a great temptation to pepper your essay with the impressive sounding vocabulary of experts. Look out for the overuse of noun phrases, acronyms and abbreviations, non-words and unnecessary specialist language in essays. Here’s an example showing how bad it can get.

Example of academic gobbledygook
In situationist projects, the methods of instrumental science are inverted and replaced with a disturbing desire to make people suffer in order to experience the sensual, essentially alienated, narcissistic aspects of modern life. The poetics of weathering, mortality, etc, became, in situationist practice, as reactionary nihilist lament upon the death of reciprocity between individual and common creativity.

We can all recognize this as impressive-sounding nonsense. However, there’s a difficult line to draw here. Does this mean you should avoid technical language? No. You can and need to use technical terms. Here’s an example with the technical terms highlighted.

HIV is now becoming increasingly under control. However, the solution has been to treat patients with toxic drugs. The first effective drug was AZT, leading to a new class of drugs known as nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The drug invented at Yale — d4T is in the same class as AZT.

Patients received a cocktail of AZT and d4T and a protease inhibitor in a treatment called highly active antiretroviral therapy or Haart for short. This treatment does not rid the body of the virus but simply keeps the viral load low and stop it damaging the immune system. Because the virus mutates quickly if the dosage is not high enough, the patients must take the drugs at the right time in the correct quantity or there is a danger the virus in the body will develop resistance. The challenge for the pharmaceutical industry is to develop new drugs to match the threat of the mutating virus.

To a non-medical person, the words highlighted in red would be jargon. But here the writer sensibly uses accepted medical terms to describe the information. HIV, AZT and d4T are acceptable because HIV is now universally recognized, AZT is a well-known medical drug and d4T is a product name. The phrases nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitor and highly active antiretroviral therapy are not jargon, but the precise terms. The phrases, viral load, immune system and mutating virus are all acceptable medical terms. However, what makes these all these terms acceptable, are three overriding considerations.

• The reader, the tutor, has an understanding of medical terms.
• The writer is not using these phrases to impress, but to explain and describe.
• The style of the rest of the paragraph is specific and clear, with short sentences, active verbs and no wasted words.

There’s a great temptation in essays to show off your knowledge, leading to a stilted and abstract academic style.

Example of abstract academic style
Conceptualizing the multiple relations into which they enter, and which they mediate, through Serres’ notion of the parasite, the manifold and complex shifts between the semiotic and the material, the intersubjective and the interobjective (and permutations thereof), and the broader implications of this analysis for the theorization of the object will be explored.

It certainly sounds impressive. You’ll find many academic experts write this way. You study what they have to say, but find it hard work to understand just what points they are trying to make. The result is usually the same. You have to dismiss the ideas because you cannot draw them out of the author’s complex style. The author, no matter how good his or her ideas, has failed to communicate.

It’s the same for tutors reading 30 essays. They are not going to award you a high mark because it sounds impressive if they cannot understand what you are saying. Tutors will not give high grades to essays they cannot fathom or have to work at to understand. They will give you a high mark for good information, well-reasoned ideas, presented in the clearest style.

Next: Avoid abstract terms

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