Consistent Vocabulary
The thesaurus is not your friend.
Many writers mistakenly believe that using different words will make their texts more interesting, when in practice it only makes their texts more confusing.
Readers use consistent words as anchors to help them track ideas through a text. When they see a different word, they expect to find a different meaning. If you change the word without changing the meaning, readers will be confused.
To write clearly, choose your vocabulary carefully and stick with your choice. This advice goes against the advice we commonly receive earlier in our education: "Vary your vocabulary! Vary your sentence structure!" That advice worked well when you needed to learn a variety of sentence structures and develop an extensive vocabulary. It also works well in certain contexts, like creative writing. However, it works against you in informative writing.
Your goal is not to develop your vocabulary or to entertain your reader. It is to communicate about your research clearly using precise language.
Clearly define vocabulary
When you are writing an informative text, clearly define the vocabulary you are using and use it consistently each time. This conscious consistency is especially important for key words but can be applied to any vocabulary choice. If you change the word you use, you are signaling to the reader that you are changing the meaning.
Remember this rule of thumb:
If you mean the same thing, use the same word.
If you mean something different, use a different word.
In technical fields, words that look like synonyms often have different meanings, which makes using them interchangeably even more dangerous.
Do you have a model, a method or a theory?
If you have people in your research, will you call them participants? patients? people? individuals?
Will your idea be called a strategy, a technique or a principle?
Choose the word that most precisely describes what you mean, then use it every time.
Readers expect to be shown consistency: using different words when you mean the same thing will not entertain the reader; it will only cause them to wonder what they missed. Once you choose consistent vocabulary, you can usually use pronouns and parallelism to shorten the text as well. Here are a few examples from different fields.
From psychology:
We gave the
We gave the participants a cognitive task, then asked them to rate their experience. The participants who scored the highest...
From computer science:
The
The algorithm runs in O(n log n) time. It was tested on 1,000 inputs and failed on edge cases.
From business:
The
The firm expanded into three new markets in Q3, hired 400 additional staff, and reported record revenue.
When you switch terms intentionally (because the meaning has changed), signal it explicitly so readers can follow you:
The team began with a
The team began with a model of user behavior. As the research developed, what had begun as a model evolved into a full theory, which was then tested against real-world data.
Why does this work?
Synonyms are not interchangeable. They each have different definitions, connotations, and situations they are best used in.
The novelist Tahereh Mafi said it best:
Synonyms know each other like old colleagues, like a set of friends who’ve seen the world together. They swap stories, reminisce about their origins and forget that though they are similar, they are entirely different, and though they share a certain set of attributes, one can never be the other. Because a quiet night is not the same as a silent one, a firm voice is not the same as a steady one, and a bright light is not the same as a brilliant one — because the way they wedge themselves into a sentence changes everything.
They are not the same.
Because synonyms aren't interchangeable, using them signals that you are changing the meaning (whether you intended to or not).
How important is consistency?
On a scale of 1-10, it's an 8: pretty important! Writing about your research is not the time to show off your extensive vocabulary. Choose the best word to get your point across and stick with it. Are you having trouble maintaining consistency? Ask for help!
