How clarity or focus conveys your message

When talking about academic writing you hear a lot about clarity. This has all to do with why academics write: To communicate thoughts and information. The goal is to do this in such a way that it is both accurate and done in a clear and easy understandable way, so that the reader doesn’t need to do a literature study to understand it.

Clarity in that sense means making sure that they key terms are well defined, long sentences are either broken down or well structured, jargon limited, and specific language is used to avoid inaccuracies or misunderstandings. Some of these I already talked about in this newsletter.

But clarity in writing comes also from something else. Something that stands out when you take a step back from the individual words and sentences. The amount of focus your piece has.

When you collect all your results, background and other pieces of information for your article, you can in theory start writing it. In practice though often you find that this tent to create a winding road for your reader to follow. One with lots of side roads that you can explore. It basically is a brain dump.

While a brain dump can put all the information and some more on paper, this often happens unstructured, or less structured than you which. The best thing you can then do, like I advised a former student of my, is to colour code by subject, followed by making a list of these. Then put those in a logical order and throw out what is irrelevant for telling your story. After which you then can proceed with writing.

How to find it

But there are many ways to find the clarity and focus of your paper. As I was reminded by an editor when I handed in a piece that lacked clarity, as a result it was hard to follow. In hindsight I think that I know where things went wrong. I had tons of information of the reporting. And though I had made the focus on two key aspects, I still tried to get the rest in.

Two pieces of advice were crucial for obtaining clarity for this piece. The first was to tell what was done and what the main conclusions are. The second was then to show how I got to those conclusions.

For a scientific article that means telling what question you want to answer, or which hypothesis is tested. This is followed by answering this question or hypothesis. Then you go over every bit of evidence and argument you got and only add those that led to that conclusion.

This is a great way of only including those bits of results that directly contribute to your conclusion. It also kind of means that you write your article, at least in part, back to front. If this feels uncomfortable you can make an outline first, which by the way helps to focus your writing even more.

By having clear before you start writing what question you want to answer and what that answer is, you focus your writing. That is not to say that when during writing your article you find that you conclusion is wrong you can’t adjust it. You can and please do if you like to have a chance to get your paper accepted. But it prevents you from straying of topic and avoids focussing on irrelevant bits of information that might confuse or distract your reader.

Prompt

Set timer at 5 minutes: Write down the main conclusion of the project or sub-project you are working on right now. Don’t worry to much of getting it a 100% right, you can always fine tune it later.

Then set the timer at 10 min and list the pieces of evidence and arguments that let to this conclusion. Is anything missing?

Happy writing

PS: If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.