It is a long list. People have a lot of problems.
Some of the items sound picky or trivial, even to me. Yet bad grammar, bad style, and poor organization will make it very difficult for you to convey your ideas clearly and professionally, and will limit your academic and professional success. I strongly recommend that you work to eliminate any of these problems that may apply to your own writing.
-- Dr. James A. Bednar
Rules for formal writing are quite strict, though often unstated. Formal writing is used in academic and scientific settings whenever you want to convey your ideas to a wide audience, with many possible backgrounds and assumptions. Unlike casual conversation or emails to friends, formal writing needs to be clear, unambiguous, literal, and well structured.
Conversely, there is no need to bring up items simply because they relate to your main topic, if you do not have anything to say about them. If you do bring something up, say something important about it!
Whenever you do include such material, i.e. things that go in the direction opposite to your main thesis, be careful to put it into only a few well-defined places, reorganizing your argument to achieve that when necessary. Jumping back and forth will confuse the reader unnecessarily. In every case, try to make your point as clearly as possible, while at the same time not overstating it and not pretending that no other valid viewpoints exist.
One clue that your writing needs better transitions is if you find that you can cut and paste paragraphs from one section to another without doing substantial rewriting of how the paragraph begins and ends. If making such rearrangements is easy, then you have not been linking your paragraphs into a coherent narrative that reads well from start to finish.
In practice, making smooth transitions is very difficult. Learning to do it takes a lot of practice at first, and actually making the transitions smooth takes a lot of effort every time you write or revise something. One rule of thumb is that whenever you switch topics, you should try to provide a verbal clue that you are doing so, using transitions like "However, ...", "As a result, ...", "For comparison, ", etc.
If you notice that you have to add these words between most of your sentences, not just the paragraphs, then you are bouncing around too much. In that case you need to reorganize your document to group related thoughts together, switching topics only when necessary. Once the organization is good, all you can do is read and reread what you write, rewording it until each new item follows easily from those before it.
Among other benefits, avoiding such informal language will ensure that your meaning is obvious even to those who have not learned the currently popular idioms, such as those for whom English is a second language and those who might read your writing years from now or in another part of the world. Formal writing should be clear to as many people as possible, and its meaning should not depend on the whims of your local dialect of English. It is a permanent and public record of your ideas, and should mean precisely what you have written.
Academic courses specify page minimums to ensure that you write an essay of the appropriate depth, not to test whether you can say the same thing a dozen different ways just to fill up space. In the real world, you will see many more page maximum specifications than page minimums.
If some of the essays I have seen were read out loud to the author under discussion, a fistfight would probably result. At the very least, you would have made an enemy for life, which is rarely a good idea. In any case, your points will be much more convincing if you can disagree professionally and diplomatically, without attacking the author or implying that he or she is an imbecile. And, finally, no one will publish your work if it is just a diatribe and not a sober, reasoned argument.
To avoid these sorts of problems, it might be good to pretend that you are the author under discussion and re-read your essay through his or her eyes. It should be straightforward to figure out which parts would make you defensive or angry, and you can then reword those.
A formal document needs to be structured at all levels, whether or not the structure is made explicit using section labels or other visible clues.
Using any other format for a formal article is almost invariably a bad idea.
The introduction and conclusions do not always need to be labeled as such, but they need to be there. Note that an abstract is no substitute for an introduction; abstracts act as an independent miniature version of the article, not part of the introduction.
Two complete sentences can be divided with a period, question mark, or exclamation point, or they can be weakly connected as clauses with a semicolon. However, they can never be connected with a comma in formal writing! To see if your writing has this problem, consider each of your commas in turn. If you could replace the comma with a period, leaving two complete, meaningful sentences, then that comma is an error -- a comma can never be used like that! Instead, replace the comma with a semicolon, in case you have two sentences that need to be linked in some generic way, or make the linkage explicit with a conjunction, or simply use a period, to leave two complete and independent sentences.
If you do not use the standard titles, e.g. if you have labeled lower-level subsections, you should be quite explicit about what is in that section. Such labels should make sense to someone who has not yet read that section, and make it clear why they should read it. For instance, a section about adding a second eye to a simulation of single-eye vision could truthfully be called "Multiple eyes", but that title is meaningless to someone scanning the document. Instead, it should be something like "Extending the model to explain stereo vision" whose meaning will be clear to the type of person likely to be reading the paper.
It is a good idea to read over anything you write, searching for this sort of word. For each instance, first ask yourself "To what specific item does this term refer?". For such a reference to make sense, the object, person, or concept must have been explicitly mentioned just prior to your reference. Often you will find that "it" or "they" refers to something vague that was not even discussed explicitly in your paper, in which case you should reword your text entirely.
Even if the item to which you refer is explicitly mentioned in your paper, ask yourself whether there is any chance that the reader might not know to which of several items you might be referring. E.g. for the word "he", were there two or three people being discussed? If so then state the actual name of each; "he" would be ambiguous.
Often an ambiguous "this" or "these" can be disambiguated by adding a noun that specifies precisely the type of object or concept to which you are referring. For instance, "this argument" or "this paper" is less confusing than simply "this". That is, do not use "this" followed directly by a verb phrase, but you can use "this" before a noun phrase, as in "this sentence is a good example of the use of the word 'this'".
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If you do not know the difference, you must simply avoid using any of these words. Yet because the spell checker takes care of all the other words you may misspell, learning to use these few words correctly is surely not much of a burden, and is crucial for convincing your readers that you are competent and trustworthy.
Correct examples:
"I like oranges, but I do not like tangerines."
"I
like oranges. However, I do not like tangerines."
"I like oranges; however,
I do not like tangerines."
"I, however, do not like grapefruits."
"I
like oranges however they have been prepared."
If you exchange any of these "but"s and "however"s, then the sentences would become incorrect, and in some cases meaningless.
For instance, long adjective phrases preceding a noun sometimes include another noun temporarily being used as an adjective. Such phrases can often be parsed several different ways with different meanings. For example, the phrase "English language learners" as written means "language learners from England", because, by default, "language" modifies "learners", and "English" modifies "language learners". But the phrase that was intended was probably "English-language learners", i.e. "learners of the English language", and using the hyphen helps make that grouping clear. Note that there would never be a hyphen if the same phrase were used after the noun it modifies, because in that case there would be absolutely no chance of ambiguity: "a learner of the English language" (NEVER "a learner of the English-language"; the hyphen effectively turns the noun phrase "English language" into an adjective, and a prepositional phrase starting with "of the" must be completed with a noun, not an adjective).
Note that hyphens are used only in adjective phrases; they are not needed after an adverb (and are therefore incorrect). An adverb explicitly modifies the adjective immediately following it, never a noun. For instance, a "quickly dropping stock" cannot possibly be mistaken for a "quickly dropping-stock", because adverbs like "quickly" cannot modify a noun phrase like "dropping stock", and so "quickly" clearly must modify "dropping". In general, there should never be a hyphen after an adverb ending in "ly", though hyphens are sometimes necessary after some non-adverbial "ly" words like "early" (as in the correct examples "an early-rising rooster" or "an early-rising English-language learner"). You may want to search through your finished document for "ly-"; nearly all examples of those three characters in a row will be mistakes.
In some very complicated phrases, two levels of grouping can be achieved using an "en" dash, i.e. a slightly longer dash than a hyphen. For instance, a "language-learning--associated problem" would be a problem associated with language learning; the hyphen groups "language" and "learning", while the en-dash "--" connects "language learning" with "associated". Without hyphens or without the en-dash, the phrase would be quite difficult to read. But in such cases it is often clearer just to reword the sentence to avoid the ambiguity, as in "a problem associated with language learning".
In cases where the word grouping is quite obvious because the pair of words are so often used together, the hyphen can be omitted even when it would strictly be required to avoid ambiguity. For instance "chocolate chip cookies" is unlikely to be misread as "chocolate chip-cookies", despite that being the literal interpretation, and so the hyphen can usually be omitted.
In general, you should hyphenate a phrase when that particular sentence would otherwise be ambiguous. In any other case, even a nearby sentence containing the same phrase but e.g. after the noun it modifies, you should leave out the hyphen.
If your word processor cannot make the spacing regular between words (e.g. most versions of Microsoft Word), turn off right justification. Poor spacing makes the page look jumbled and seem incoherent, even if the writing is not.
Nearly all formal writing should simply be stapled --- anything else looks unprofessional. For instance, using a fancy cover and binding for a short paper or report is distracting and makes it difficult to photocopy the paper; such binding is necessary only for long papers that a staple would have trouble keeping together. At the opposite extreme, it should be obvious that folding one corner is not an acceptable substitute for a staple.
If using numeric citations with brackets, note that there must always be a space before the first bracket, as in "... known [1]", (not "... known[1]").
If using author-date citations, you must remember that any item in parentheses does not exist, as far as the grammar of the sentence is concerned, and thus it cannot be used as part of the sentence. Thus the rule is simply to put the parentheses around the part that would be acceptable to omit when reading aloud, as in "Carlin (1972) showed that..." or "... as seen in rats (Carlin 1972)." (not "(Carlin 1972) showed that..." and not "... as seen in rats Carlin (1972).").
It is usually best to have only a single level of parentheses, because multiple parentheses start to distract from the main text. Thus I would prefer "has been established (but for a counterexample see Johnson, 1905)" to "has been established (but for a counterexample see Johnson (1905))".
Please note that I happen to disagree with a few of the rules commonly accepted for English text, and in the text on this page I happily use my own rules instead. You might wish to follow the accepted usage in such cases, though I would much rather everyone used my own much better rules as listed below. If you do agree to join my one-man campaign to fix the English language, I cannot accept any responsibility for points deducted by less enlightened folks. :-)
This document is in the public domain. You are free to copy it,
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notice, (2) clearly mark the original author, and (3) clearly mark any changes
that you make as your own and not those of the original author.
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| jbednar@inf.ed.ac.uk | Last update: 2012/07/23 01:48:31. |