Date published March 15, 2019 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: April 24, 2020
The goal of using headings in a document is not only to divide information, but also to allow easy navigation of the document. In academic writing, headings help readers find the specific information they want while retaining a sense of how that information fits with everything else in the document.
To test for overall heading clarity, ask yourself the following: from reading your headings in sequence, would an informed reader understand…
- The content of the document as a whole?
- The specific content of each section?
- How each section fits with the others?
If not, your headings need some improvement.
Continue reading: How to write effective headings
Date published April 28, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: June 24, 2019
Most grammatical rules help us establish clear structure in language, meaning that they’re not just rules for the sake of having rules—they’re rules for the sake of clearer communication. This article outlines some of the most commonly violated grammatical rules that effect clarity or logic and don’t fit easily under other headings like punctuation or sentence structure.
Continue reading: Common grammatical problems with clarity and logic
Date published April 28, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: June 5, 2019
There are words that you should avoid in academic writing, but some other words are simply misused or misunderstood, creating confusion in your writing.
This article discusses some of the most frequently misused and confused words in English. Learning the rules to distinguish between them can quickly improve the clarity and quality of your writing.
Continue reading: Common word choice confusions
Date published April 28, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: January 17, 2020
Sentence structure determines how the different parts of a sentence are put together, from its punctuation to the ordering of its words. As well as following basic word order rules, there are many other things you have to consider to write correctly and clearly structured sentences.
There are two especially common sentence construction mistakes:
- Run-on sentences: incorrect punctuation used to join different parts of a sentence
- Sentence fragments: missing necessary components to form a full grammatically correct sentence
Sentence structure is not just a matter of grammar, but also of style and flow. Strong academic writing uses a variety of sentence lengths and structures. It’s important to avoid overly long sentences that can be confusing for readers, but too many very short sentences can make your text feel choppy and disjointed.
Continue reading: Common mistakes in sentence structure
Date published April 23, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: March 27, 2017
The following is a list of commonly deployed phrasal verbs that find one use or another in academic texts. These (and others) can be acceptably used in academic texts. Along with these examples, however, are a number of one-word substitutions to illustrate that in each case the phrasal verb can be easily replaced.
Continue reading: 47 phrasal verbs and their one-word substitutions
Date published April 23, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: June 5, 2019
A phrasal verb combines two or more words to describe a specific action. Phrasal verbs can be difficult to get right, as their meaning usually has nothing to do with the definitions of the component words.
This means that phrasal verbs must be treated as distinct pieces of vocabulary. You have to learn them as a single unit of meaning, just like you would learn any single word.
Phrasal verbs are extremely common in everyday speech, but in academic writing, it’s best to replace them with one-word alternatives where possible.
47 phrasal verbs and one-word alternatives
Continue reading: Phrasal verbs
Date published April 21, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: March 27, 2017
We don’t account for adjectives in the article Adverbials (except with the linking verb, where a subject compliment functions as an adjective) because they always accompany nouns and tend not to move around sentences much.
Continue reading: Word Order Rules: Adjectives
Date published April 21, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: April 3, 2018
The examples in the article Word Order Rules in English outline all of the sentence positions in their most common ordering, except for one final kind of sentence position: the adverbial.
Adverbials are words or phrases that provide the information typically provided by adverbs:
Continue reading: Word Order Rules: Adverbials
Date published April 21, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: February 20, 2019
In theory, English sentences take a simple form much of the time. The basic rules for which words appear in a sentence can help you with most of the sentences you’ll need in academic writing.
If we push on these rules, we’ll find many exceptions, but the point here is only to provide a kind of template that can be followed much of the time.
Continue reading: Word Order Rules in English
Date published April 14, 2015 by Shane Bryson. Date updated: December 5, 2019
Parentheses are used to add extra information in a sentence. In academic writing, they are most often used to convey technical information such as equations, to introduce acronyms, and for in-text citations.
Continue reading: Parentheses ()
