Do Not Be Afraid To Play with Your Academic Writing

Do Not Be Afraid To Play with Your Academic Writing
Writing is a serious business for academics and scientists. Whether they are writing informal research blogs online or formal articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals, scholars tend to write for professional purposes, as do so many other people in our text-rich modern world. Serious though the task of writing may be, however, and indeed because it is so very important a part of a productive academic or scientific career, it is vital to play with scholarly writing, at least occasionally. For master wordsmiths who are confident in their language skills, there is rarely hesitation about playing around with vocabulary choices, phrasing options and sentence structures, but for those who find writing more challenging or who are facing the difficulties associated with writing in a language that is not native to them, finding a single way to express a concept may prove so difficult that the idea of changing it borders on the ludicrous. Such authors are, however, the very ones who will benefit most from playing with their writing, so the following tips may prove helpful or inspiring.

• Do not be afraid to make changes and try out new forms of expression. You may be able to anticipate that certain revisions will have a positive effect, but only by actually reconstructing your prose, seeing the new version on the page and reading the text aloud can you determine if the changes truly are successful. If you are worried that you will make matters worse, save the document with a new name as you start to play so that the original version will still be available. Another option is to track your changes in a program such as Microsoft Word so that you can easily return to the original wording.
• Consider your vocabulary choices critically and look up alternatives in a dictionary or thesaurus to ensure that you have the best word for your meaning in each and every case. Remember that the right words should express your meaning with absolute precision and they are very different in effect from words that are almost right. In addition, using the perfect noun or verb can help you write more concisely by avoiding excessive adjectives and adverbs. If appropriate, it can even add allusion or meaningful word play.
• When writing is a challenge, clinging to a simple sentence structure throughout a text can be akin to clinging to a life preserver in a stormy sea. Keeping it simple is a good idea, of course, and not just to make the task of writing more manageable. Readers benefit as well when complicated information is communicated in as simple and straightforward a manner as possible. Yet when every sentence uses the same structure – say, the basic subject-verb-object pattern of simple English sentences – the prose will quickly become repetitive and dull, even when different kinds and amounts of information are shared in each sentence. Play with various sentence structures to create variety and, ideally, to enhance the logical progression of your argument.
• On the topic of logical argumentation, which still tends to be a requirement of successful scholarly prose, playing with your writing can markedly improve the clarity of your argument for your readers. It can also clarify and deepen the argument in your own mind, improving the analyses and conclusions you offer your audience. Focus on transition points between the sections of a text, its paragraphs and its key argumentative sentences, and use trigger words and phrases that connect transitional ideas effectively. Play with your vocabulary choices and the structure of your sentences until each transition point flows smoothly from one concept or topic to the next.