If you can lay these myths to rest, you will convey your message more easily and effectively.

5. I need to use big words.​

In academic writing and scientific writing, you’ll probably already have quite a few big words to describe the context of your research. You can’t change these key words, but you can balance them out with shorter, simpler words. Choose short words whenever possible to lighten up the sentence.

For example, choose:

• “use” instead of “utilize” and
• "also" instead of "in addition".

Using shorter, more common words gives your reader a chance to catch their breath!

4. Passive voice makes me look objective.​

Passive voice does not have the power to cause objectivity. All passive voice does is take away the agent of an action. The passive voice and active voice are tools that allow you to move the parts of the sentence around and in doing so, improve the flow.

Sometimes the passive voice can help you (like when discussing methods or processes), but other times it can hinder you (like when drawing conclusions). If you overuse the passive voice in your discussion, for example, it can make you look like you are not taking responsibility for the conclusions you’ve drawn or the decisions you’ve made. Read more here.

3. I need to have complicated sentences because my topic is complicated.​

Actually, the more complicated the topic, the simpler the sentence structure should be. A complicated structure obscures your message because you give your reader two things to decipher (structure and message) rather than just one (message). Use parallelism to create elegant simplicity.

2. I should use a thesaurus to avoid repeating any words.​

On the contrary, you will need to repeat certain words exactly to avoid confusing your reader. Rarely do we find two words that are exact synonyms.
Follow this guideline:

If you mean the same thing, use the same word.
If you mean something different, use a different word.

1. The only way my article will get accepted is if I write the way everyone else is writing, even if I don’t like it myself.​

The best writers make every effort to write clearly at all stages of their education. Have the courage to write an article you would want to read. Don’t use words you wouldn’t normally use when talking about your research. If you read a sentence and can’t understand it yourself, then no one else can either. We (your readers, as well as publishers and journals) want you to write clearly, concisely and actively; we don’t want jargon-laden, noun-heavy, paragraph-long sentences.

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.

What's a take-home message?​

We created ReallyWrite to empower you to write clearly. We want to help you learn to make your own decisions about your writing.

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.

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.

Question​

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:

5 ways you can use ReallyWrite to make your teaching life easier​

Those articles haven't always been so heavy​

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.

Learning feels uncomfortable​

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".