10. Avoid colloquialisms. “This is a totally cool novel” is a great statement to make to a friend. In an academic essay, however, it is jarring. It is also extremely annoying to see smiley faces and bunches of exclamation signs in academic writing. Try to convey your emotions with words and not with signs. Also, when I see “LOL” and “LMAO” in an academic essay, I see red. What am I, your Facebook buddy?
11. Avoid cliches. Statements like “Since time immemorial. . .” or “since the dawn of its existence, the genre. . .” sound horrible. If you don’t perceive them as such, this means you need to start reading a lot of good writing. As a former lover of such horrible cliches, this is what I did to learn to recognize and avoid them.
12. Start strong. People have little time and short attention spans nowadays. At the same time, people tend to value their own investment. You need to do all you can to avoid losing your readers’ attention for as long as you can. Once you’ve got them to be interested in the first couple of pages, they are likely to continue reading. This means that the first few paragraphs are absolutely crucial. Try to make them as engaging as you can. Don’t hide your most valuable insights at the end of the essay. (This is something I’m still struggling with.)
13. Avoid interspersing your writing with endless “basically” and “actually.” More often than not, these words mean nothing. Yet some people tend to add them to every other sentence which is beyond annoying. The same goes for “kind of”, “sort of” and “or whatever.”
14. Can the drama. You have no idea how often I receive essays where people spend up to a page describing the problems they faced reading the text I asked them to analyze: “At first, I didn’t understand this reading at all. It made me feel completely stupid because I had no idea what it meant. I read it again and still understood nothing. I was about to give up when I realized. . .” Unless the topic of the essay is “The issues I faced when trying to understand the text and how I dealt with them,” just can the drama and do the work.
15. Avoid repetitions. This has been a huge issue for me, people. Good writing is never repetitive. Each new sentence brings something new to the piece. It makes no sense to write a sentence that does nothing but repeat what you have already said. You need to trust that your readers are not complete idiots and are capable of understanding on a first try. As I said, I find it hard to believe that about people. You see, how annoying repetitive writing is? This is why whenever you feel tempted to say “As I already said”, you might wonder why you are saying it again.
16. Read a lot of good academic writing and pay special attention to how this author structures sentences and paragraphs.
I’ve got to run now but if people have any other suggestions, please share them.
P.S. If you feel tempted to ask why I don’t observe these rules on this blog, the answer is: because this isn’t academic writing. I can be as repetitive and colloquial as I please. LMAO.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think some people need #14 to get started writing. The trick is, it needs to be edited out in the second draft as irrelevant.
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#14 can be relevant. For example, on may wish to discuss how Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an extremely confusing text for a beginner to read. It has nothing but Biblical language and references to the Bible, but it is presenting a naturalistic approach to religion and morality. Many of the philosophical conclusions are extremely negative or satirical. The literary style and the pessimism make it very hard to grasp, and it is relevant to notice this.
“One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention — he did not want to be understood by just ‘anybody.’ (Nietzsche, GS 381)
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Not long ago I argued in this blog that philosophers often purposely obfuscate their writing. I didn’t know that Nietzsche had been out in the open about this.
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People may have different reasons for making their writing complex. In the case of Descartes, it has been suggested that he wanted to throw the religious guys off his trail by using words in slightly misleading or convoluted way. Nietzsche’s motivations were only slightly different, in that he wanted to make a substantial critique of the ideologies of his time, without being denied a voice or labeled as crazy (the usual silencing tactics).
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We have an entire movement in lit crit that does this on purpose. The idea is to weed out the “undesirable ” readers. I don’t subscribe to this idea.
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Avoid the use of vague terms such as many, lots, few, profound, large.
For example if you wrote “there are lots of tigers in India” in an academic paper you need to further qualify that. Not necessarily down to head count per sq. km. if your paper is not in biology and which doesn’t mean anything either to the average layperson, but to a point that people can understand what you mean, e.g. “there are lots of tigers in India to the extent that they are no longer at risk of extinction” (I wish), or “to the extent that frequent encounters with humans are rather common” or “enough to make them the number one threat for cattle”.
Same with “profound”. It’s both a cliche and a crutch as in “such thing has profound implications on some other thing”.
What do you mean by profound? “many implications”, “surprising implications”, “high correlation?”, “insightful implications which are not apparently obvious”. As I said the term is just too vague for academic writing and it’s often used to give the appearance of profundity (in the sense of insight) without actually showing any. Be more precise as to what type of profundity you are referring to and give at least one example (with more to come). If you have none, then you need to rephrase your statement: “we propose that such thing and some other thing might be interrelated”.
p.s. A similar and rather common crutch in England is “extraordinary”, to the extent that (1) I can barely watch the BBC anymore and (2) there is a promotional clip by the BBC itself with clips from their talking heads, and literally about half of them are “extraordinary”…. but I digress, the BBC is not academic writing.
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Great, great, great points! Also, “interesting” is a very annoying word. “Cervantes’s Don Quijote is an interesting novel”, how boring is this statement?
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