Academic writing style: clarity, concision, and tone
There's a tempting but mistaken idea that academic writing should sound complicated — long sentences, unnecessarily fancy words, dense paragraphs. In reality, the strongest academic writing is usually the clearest, not the most elaborate. A complicated idea explained simply is a genuine achievement; a simple idea buried in unnecessary complexity is not sophistication, it's an obstacle for the reader.
Clarity over complexity
- Prefer shorter sentences to long, clause-stacked ones. If a sentence needs three commas and a semicolon to hold together, it's often two or three ideas trying to share one sentence — split it.
- Prefer plain words over inflated ones, when both mean the same thing. "Use" instead of "utilize," "show" instead of "demonstrate" (unless you specifically mean a formal proof or demonstration), "about" instead of "approximately," where the meaning doesn't actually require the fancier word.
- Define jargon and acronyms on first use, even ones that feel obvious within your field — your marker or a general reader may not share that background, and being self-contained is a mark of good writing, not a concession to a weaker reader.
- One main idea per paragraph. If you can't summarise a paragraph's point in one sentence, it's probably trying to do too much at once.
Tone
- Formal, but not stiff. Avoid contractions ("don't" → "do not") and casual phrasing, but that doesn't mean every sentence needs to sound like a legal document — a clear, direct sentence is still formal.
- Hedge appropriately, don't overhedge. Academic writing is often careful about overstating certainty ("this suggests," "this may indicate," rather than "this proves"), which is good practice — but stacking multiple hedges in one sentence ("it could perhaps possibly suggest") weakens your writing without adding real caution.
- Active vs. passive voice — some fields and supervisors have strong preferences here (passive voice, "the sample was tested," is traditional in some scientific writing; active voice, "we tested the sample," is increasingly preferred elsewhere for being more direct and readable). Check what's expected in your specific context rather than assuming one is universally correct.
Why is this important?
Unclear writing doesn't just annoy a reader — it actively costs you marks and credibility, because a marker who has to work hard to understand what you mean is more likely to conclude (fairly or not) that you don't fully understand it yourself. Clear writing, by contrast, makes your actual ideas and results easier to evaluate on their own merits, which is generally what you want.
A practical editing pass
Once a draft is written, do at least one editing pass specifically for style, separate from checking content accuracy:
- Read it aloud (or have a tool read it aloud to you) — awkward sentences are often much more obvious by ear than by eye.
- Highlight every sentence over roughly 30–35 words and check whether it should be split.
- Search for common inflated phrases ("in order to" → "to," "due to the fact that" → "because," "a large number of" → "many") and simplify them.
- Check that every acronym is defined the first time it's used, and check for consistent terminology — don't switch between "model," "system," and "algorithm" to refer to the same thing without reason.
Tips
- Write your first draft quickly and roughly, without worrying about style at all, then edit for clarity as a distinct, later pass. Trying to write perfectly polished sentences on the first attempt slows drafting down enormously and rarely produces better prose anyway.
- Ask a peer to read a section and tell you, in their own words, what it means — if their summary doesn't match what you intended, that's a clarity problem worth fixing (see also Giving and Receiving Peer Feedback).
- Keep a short personal list of your own recurring style habits (a filler phrase you overuse, a tendency to write overly long sentences) and check for them specifically during editing.
References
Williams, J. M., & Bizup, J. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. A widely used, practical guide to clear academic and professional prose.