# Advanced Academic Writing Notes 1

###### Tags: `Notes`

Last week I started to attend the Advanced Academic Writing course in Imperial College. As a non-native speaker, this course is really helpful. Here is how I feel for the first lecture.

### How does a good paper look like?
A good research paper needs to be easy to understand. There is no point getting to the top of the mountain if the author finds himself/herself there alone. It is the writer's responsibility to communicate 'downwards' to help others up the research mountain. Therefore, writing needs to be clearly expressed – to help those who know less than the writer.

A research paper aims to teach the reader authors' work. Such teaching is invisible if the authors make things clear and simple, like one point per paragraph. In a well-written paper, a question raised in one sentence is answered instantly in the following sentence, guiding the reader to read through.

### My reflection as a non-native speaker student:

When writing academically for Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, or Medicine (STEMM) subjects, most people know that the general goal of a paper/thesis is to clarify the following points:
* What we did
* Why we did it
* What we found
* What we think it all means

Here I reflect three things that I learnt wrong until I attend these lectures.

**1. Repetition is good.**

In China, I was taught to avoid using repeated words, even for the same thing. In English writing exams, it shows that the writer has a 'rich' vocabulary. Repetition is actually good for academic writing. Using different words can make readers confused: Why the term changes? Is there any reason that I am not aware? Such questions bother the readers and resist them to follow the rest of the content. However, if the paper sticks to the same word, the readers know that they mean the same thing and can read through smoothly. All of our goals is to 'help' readers to learn. A synonym is only used when it is on purpose to help the readers to learn.

Many people use [Thesaurus](https://www.thesaurus.com/) to look for synonyms. However, there are still tiny differences between them and may cause misunderstanding. For instance, the word 'adequate' actually has a more negative connotation than 'sufficient' – anything that we call adequate now means not adequate.

**2. A short sentence is good.**

I liked writing long sentences that contain various clauses to address several points. I grew the habit of 'producing' complicated sentences to get high marks in exams like IELTS. Having complicated sentences shows that the writer has excellent grammar skills. This attitude is wrong for academic writing.

Even a sentence is grammatically correct, the longer it is, the less the reader can understand. Some noun phrases can get too complex with too much detail packed into them. The readers have to unpack by themselves and may lose the main point of the sentence. Writing a complicated sentence is selfish. A complicated sentence can only show off that the writer is smart, but the readers get nothing.

Interestingly, there are some guidelines about sentence length, and we can follow: [The average word length in Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling is 12 words](https://englangbooks.co.uk/books-chapters-paragraphs-words-guidelines-on-length/), and [people who work for the UK government are not allowed to write a sentence longer than 25 words](https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/08/04/sentence-length-why-25-words-is-our-limit/).

**3. A simple strong verb is good.**

I used to avoid using "we" and active voice since A level. It seems like these are getting popular in academic writing: We use "we" to highlight the contribution of the paper; a verb is simple and clear, like 'developed' vs 'performed the development of'. Rewriting a sentence to 'move' the information helps readers know what the writer thinks is important.


Fig. 1: Effective STEM writing & typical features by [Neil Taylor](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/n.taylor).