My advisor told me yesterday my academic writing was annoying. In a quest to be a better writer, I am mostly documenting this as a set of notes for me.

  1. Don’t try too hard. I am a mega culprit of this, and often use words that, while they sound cool, offer little meaning to the sentence.
  2. Never overstate. Science is about just presenting what you’ve done.
  3. Verb choice is really important.
  4. Stop using passive voice. I use lots of passive voice in my first drafts of things, and it just leads to bad writing. Utilize the “by zombies” trick when you are in doubt. (http://auwritingcenter.blogspot.com/2012/10/identify-passive-voice-with-zombies.html)
  5. Avoid statements that don’t add anything. In the context of a paper about social media being used to identify disinformation campsigns, a sentence like “Social media is the new frontier for disinformation campaigns” is a terrible sentence. It doesn’t add anything to the writing.