Many of us struggle at the beginning stages of an article.
How should it be structured? What information belongs in this article? And how do I sort out all the information floating around in my head?
We can make this struggle easier by defining our take-home message early, preferably before we start writing.
We created ReallyWrite to empower you to write clearly. We want to help you learn to make your own decisions about your writing.
The ReallyWrite Editor can help you see your blind spots at the sentence level and push you to more clarity and accessibility.
You may have noticed that the line-by-line feedback you receive in the ReallyWrite Editor is coupled to a learn page. The learn page explains why that issue matters and how you can go about fixing it.
ReallyWrite does not fix your text for you. Instead, it acts like a fresh, critical reader and helps you identify issues that are hard to see when you have been working on a text for a long time. It cannot tell you what to write, but it can automatically recognize the potential issues and show you how to fix them. Think of it as a teacher looking over your shoulder.
Notice the potential issues in your text in the ReallyWrite Editor, then read about how you can fix them in the learn pages.
You won't fix ALL the issues that ReallyWrite points out. They are potential issues, so you need to think critically about each issue and decide whether it makes sense to rewrite your sentence to remove that issue.
Photo by Brooke Cagle
We see illogical structures more often than we think.
And the worst part?
We tend to blame ourselves when we struggle to parse a sentence, instead of noticing how the writer may have inadvertently made our job harder.
I recently had a question from a subscriber of the free email course. When they first read about given to new, they asked:
Speakers of Romance languages like French, Italian, or Spanish can face some specific difficulties when writing advanced English.
If you are in this situation, check out the following 3 tips to help you with the most common difficulties:
Writing is hard for everyone, that’s a given.
But writing can be hard in a different way for native speakers and non-native speakers of English.
Most teachers don't have time to explicitly teach writing as well as their content matter, but they still want students to write decently.
Because of course, who will be reading those papers?
If this sounds familiar to you, then why not use ReallyWrite in your classes? It's minimal effort, zero risk, and high reward.
To get you started:
Do you ever put down an article and wonder if it really had to be so hard to read? If it couldn't have been easier, lighter, more interesting? If it couldn´t have been written in a way that made it a pleasure, not a burden, to read?
Research articles don't have to be so heavy. They haven't always been this way.
It's human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But when it comes to learning, the proverb is true: no pain, no gain.
Learning is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to make us feel vulnerable and uncertain.
But when we're in the middle of that discomfort and we feel like everything is wrong, we may start to think that we haven't learned anything. Or we may get discouraged and think that we will never learn it. Maybe we want to lash out or give up.
My academic writing classes start with skeptics and usually end with converts. The path between can be uncomfortable.
Some participants hate writing. Some have had bad past experiences, which they describe as "frustrating" and even "traumatic".
My students sometimes feel that applying the principles[^1] of clear writing conflicts with them developing their own personal writing style.
We can resolve this conflict if we think about our stages of learning. I particularly like using the ancient Japanese concept of Shuhari.