Five scientific support methods for improving academic writing (Opinions)

I vividly remember when an editor-in-chief invited me to publish in a famous diary. Just since defending the defense of the paper, I still struggle to understand how publishing works in academia – for example, should I try to mimic the intensively written, abstract sentences that appear in the journal he edited. I capitalized the latest issue and looked at him. “Should I use the house style?”

He shivered, and the other editors I heard since reverberate my response in the same respected journal: “Please don’t! We published the manuscript despite their writings.”

However, this candid advice has brought another dilemma to most graduate students and even experienced faculty members. If you can’t imitate articles published in the best journals, how do you write research to publish?

Early in my teaching writing courses, I found that students rarely go through major revisions, even if they receive extensive feedback from me and their peers. In fact, even if students receive feedback and grades from their peers, there is no modification.

All writing students also struggle with the idea that feedback and grades of their writing are subjective, which reflects how a particular instructor prioritizes students writing in a specific course. Furthermore, English literature and creative writing courses teach students to write is a combination of mystery and art.

In contrast, researchers in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have identified features that make sentences easy or difficult to read. As a result, we can teach students how to clearly show that their sentences are clear—no matter how complex the subject is. As a graduate student or faculty member, you can improve your academic writing and publishing opportunities by focusing on five basic principles that allow readers to clearly perceive sentences.

1. Active voice makes sentences easier to read.

In the study, the researchers found that readers understand sentences faster when they reflect causality. We can trace it back to two factors. First, our brains naturally perceive causes and effects, which evolve into survival mechanisms. For example, studies have shown that six-month-old babies may recognize causality.

Second, the English sentence structure reflects the reasons and effects of word order: theme – animal objects. As the researchers found, participants read sentences at speed one third faster than passive speech readings. Furthermore, these same participants even misunderstood one-quarter of the simple sentences of the time with simple sentences in passive pronunciation. Although many writing lecturers require students to use proactive pronunciation, few remind students of the specific benefits of proactive sentences, making them easier to read. These sentences are shorter, more efficient, and more specific, while enhancing the reader’s sense of causality.

Consider the difference between the first example below, which relies on passive voice and the second one uses active voice differences.

Passive: It is reported that the expansion of the stomach antrworm may cause a feeling of fullness due to the release of dissolved gas from carbonated water, which improves stomach movement and thus reduces hunger.

Positive: Cuomo, Savarese, Sarnelli, etc. Drinking carbonated water induces fullness and improves stomach movement by releasing dissolved gases, all of which reduces hunger.

2. An actor or concrete object turns a sentence into a micro-stable.

Academic writing can naturally solve complex content, and it can be challenged even for subject matter experts. However, by using nouns, readers can easily identify it as a subject, making it even challenging by clearly clarifying the cause and effect of its sentence. When the grammatical theme in a sentence is obviously able to perform actions, the reader processes the sentence with greater speed and less effort. For actors, users, organizations or publications – any individual, group or project that intends to make an impact.

We unconsciously think that these sentences are easier to read and recall because identifying actors and actions in sentences helps readers fix the meaning of words and their roles in sentence structure. Furthermore, these nouns improve the efficiency of any sentence by cutting the words. The following examples are examples:

Abstract nouns as theme: Virginia Woolf’s examination of the social and economic barriers faced by female writers is because women have no place in the literature major and are therefore demoted to families, especially audiences of young women who struggle to strive for their right to study in college after their political success.

Actors as theme: exist A room for one personVirginia Woolf examines the social and economic barriers faced by female writers. Despite political success by the senator, writers like Woolf struggled with the perception that women had no place in the literature profession. So Woolf’s book resonates with the audience, and young women have to fight for the right to study in college.

3. Pronouns send the reader backwards, but readers can understand the sentence by predicting what will happen next.

If writers imitate academic writing they see in printing, they usually rely on pronouns as the subject of sentences, especially “this,” “that,” “these,” “these,” “these,” “these,” and “IT.” However, pronouns save writers time, but for two reasons, the cost of readers is greatly for readers.

First, readers often assume that pronouns refer to single nouns, not a group of nouns, phrases or even entire sentences. Second, when the author uses these pronouns without nouns to anchor the meaning, the reader slows down and often misleads the meaning of the pronoun. Furthermore, readers will write less of the writing sample than the writing sentences that rely on actors as the subject, and even pronouns like “this” are based on “results”.

Pronouns as theme: Due to the potential confusion of sulfonylfluorobacteria and insulin in the comparative arms for evaluating the anticancer effects of metformin/thiazolidinediones, it is difficult to draw any definite conclusions from previous studies.

Actors as theme: In trials that evaluate the anticancer effects of metformin/thiazolidinedione, it is difficult for us to draw any definite conclusions from previous studies due to potential confounding effects and the harmful effects of insulin.

4. Action verbs make sentences more specific, efficient and memorable.

Open any newspaper or magazine and you can find action verbs such as “argument”, “reshape”, “writing” and “remake”. By contrast, most writers go beyond non-action verbs. These verbs include “is, “was”, “look”, “appear”, “become”, “represent” and evergreen academic writing topics, “trend”.

Action verbs enable readers to recognize verbs immediately, which is the core process of understanding sentence structure and understanding meaning. In addition, action verbs make sentences more effective, more specific and memorable. In a study of verbs and memory, readers recall concrete verbs more accurately than non-performing verbs.

When we read action verbs, our brain recruits sensorimotor systems, producing faster reaction times than abstract or non-verb verbs that are processed outside of that system. Even in patients with dementia, action verbs can still identify patients with advanced disease due to the semantic richness of the linking action verbs recruited in the brain.

Non-action verb: Claims that promote research “excellence” and self-esteem has become commonplace in the records of “excellence”, but the specificity of such excellence is not yet clear.

Verb verb: Research institutions claim to promote teachers on the basis of research “excellence,” but institutions define “excellence” in many ways, with little clear definition.

5. Put the subject and the verb together.

When we read, we understand the meaning of the sentence based on our predictions about how it unfolds. We unconsciously make these predictions from the encounters of thousands of sentences. Most importantly, these predictions depend on our ability to recognize grammatical subjects and verbs.

It is easy for us to make these predictions when the author leans the subject and the verb together. Instead, we struggle when the author separates the subject and the verb. As the distance between the subject and the verb increases, the reader puts more energy into it, and the reading slows down. What’s more striking is that readers make more mistakes when identifying topics and verbs with increased number of words between topics and verbs, even in relatively short sentences.

For example, in this sentence, the reader must accidentally encounter two adjectives noted from the following, and then encounter the verb “reduction” and pair with the underlined subject “rules”:

However, because readers rely on the order of subject-animal objects, this separation will make working memory form the structure of the identification sentence. Ironically, as academic writers mature in their subject expertise, they thwart readers’ understanding mechanisms. Your desire to modify the subject of the sentence immediately through phrases and clauses slows down reading and increases the reader’s conscious effort.

On the other hand, when the subject is close to the verb, the reading speed increases while the effort decreases. Introduce your key points with topics and verbs, and modify them with clauses or phrases:

These principles will work in any discipline, allowing the author to control how editors and peer reviewers respond to their manuscripts and suggestions. These changes can help make academic careers successful and are crucial in today’s competitive environment.