So here are the rules of good academic writing that I use:
1. Avoid announcing your intentions. Often people start a 3-page essay with “In this essay, I will explore. . .” What’s the point of wasting space on these declarations? Just go and explore whatever you want to explore already. Jonathan Mayhew, a literary critic whose style I admire, suggests that this signposting can be avoided even in books, let alone essays or articles. Here is a great post he wrote on the subject.
2. Avoid being verbose. Why hide your ideas behind a mountain of circumlocutions and endless introductory statements? The best kind of writing is direct and clear. I have a natural tendency to be verbose which means that I have to pare down my first drafts heavily. If your sentences tend to run on for half a page, there might be a verbosity problem.
3. Avoid choppiness. Writing in choppy sentences is not a good alternative to verbosity. When you create something like “Bildungsroman is an important genre. It has produced many works of literature”, try to combine the two sentences into one (These are very stupid sentences, I know. I’m just trying to give an example here.)
4. Be careful with the passive voice. There is nothing inherently evil about the passive voice. “This novel was published in 2012” is a perfectly legitimate sentence. However, often the passive voice conceals the author’s ignorance. If you keep saying that “Bildungsroman is considered to be an important genre” and “this issue is believed to be crucial”, you might need to stop and ask yourself whether both you and your readers can easily name the person or people who do the considering and believing.
5. Avoid generalizations. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to read essays that start with “everybody knows that. . .” and “it is obvious to everybody that. . .” First of all, if it’s so obvious, then why waste space saying it? Often, people hide their own very questionable opinions in such statements. Let’s avoid talking about everybody and everything and limit ourselves to the specific and provable.
6. Avoid stating the painfully obvious. Unless your reader is a 5-year-old, there is no need to say things like, “Spain is a country in Europe.” It sounds extremely condescending and makes your reader think that you are just padding your piece with platitudes because you have nothing to say.
7. Avoid providing dictionary definitions of simple words. See above for reasons why.
8. Avoid silly puns and broken down words. By broken down words I mean annoying constructions like “(under)-STAND-ing fem(in)ism.” Brrr, this is so eighties!
9. Don’t use terminology unless you are completely sure what the term you are using means. A metaphor, an alliteration and a hyperbole refer to completely different things and cannot be used interchangeably.
[To be continued. . .]
Clarissa's Blog 
Where did the custom of announcing of intentions come from? Did it come from the sciences or something? Or did theory oriented editors and publishers in English start promoting it? Because I do not remember it always being so prevalent as it became at a certain point (in 90s it seemed to be downright fashionable).
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I don’t know, this is one issue I never had, at least. But I see it in students’ essays all the time. I think it is simply a way to pad a paper.
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I don’t get it from students but I sure do see it in articles and books. “In what follows I shall attempt to suggest that…” and so on. 😉
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In certain types of scientific writing is very useful to know what the destination is. Those papers are not as much read as reconstructed using the paper as a guideline. Only when one re-derives the original result does true understanding is gained.
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I was instructed to explicitly in high school. Say what you’re going to say, say it, then say what you said, no exceptions. blech! I used to write my essay, summarize what I said for the conclusion and then copy and paste it to the introduction and change a few things around, but that’s what the teachers wanted!
They also instructed us to put in ‘general discussion’. That is, talking about “all people wish to be happy” and weird general statements that never really related to the textual issue at hand. And I went to a very highly regarded public high school *sigh*.
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This is really interesting, thanks for putting it up, Clarissa! My writing got infinitely better when I got to college (I got C’s in high school English, but then got to college, and got 1 of the 2 A’s given to all the 200 students in the program. Something finally clicked. That, and we were finally writing about stuff I found more concrete.) Anyhow, I’m always looking for ways to improve my (academic) writing, which I know is a weak spot for me. So thanks 🙂
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At least one journal in which I publish insists that the first paragraph be an abstract of the paper. This allows a reader to decide quickly whether to read the article or whether it is something not of interest to him or her.
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I find it very hard to write these abstracts for some reason.
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I am good at lapidary concision so I am a great abstract writer. But I thought abstracts were separate from the paper.
I do think this is the kind of editorial custom that encourages such writing, though.
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I agree with you about signposting, but I’ve also had editors insist that I announce an essay’s intentions using exactly the kind of phrasing in your first point.
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As for announcing your intentions, I’ve heard the whole “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them” advice being given a lot. In some genres of academic writing, I suppose it works, but not so much in the Humanities.
5. Avoid generalizations. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to read essays that start with “everybody knows that. . .” and “it is obvious to everybody that. . .” First of all, if it’s so obvious, then why waste space saying it? Often, people hide their own very questionable opinions in such statements. Let’s avoid talking about everybody and everything and limit ourselves to the specific and provable.
People do this? *thud*
Great post! I was the go-to woman in my social circle at WKU for reviewing papers. As a result, I read a lot of bad writing. If I’d had this post to refer people to, it would have cut down a lot of frustration.
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Yes, I get a lot of “Everybody knows that men are more rational and women are more emotional. ” 🙂
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I found myself, recently, recommending signposting to a writer who I couldn’t follow. You cannot just leave it out, but rather signpost without signposting, signaling where the argument will go–but in a less ham-fisted way.
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