Wording, Phrasing, and Paragraphing in Academic and Professional Writing

I have been working as a Teaching Assistant for 13 academic terms, at the time of writing this post. I also have been a writing tutor at the writing centre of a prestigious college in Canada. Finally, I have been a language teacher for more than seven years, dealing with my students’ writing assignments. Many people probably have more expertise on the subject than I do. Yet, I thought I could put my experience to some use. I wanted to provide students and entry-level staff with some rules related to professional and academic writing.

It should be addressed first that not all professions need to write academically, nor do all disciplines in Academia follow the same writing style. However, there are essential things in common amongst them on which I intend to put more emphasis. Wherever I know something is not a universal rule, I mention the field the rule applies to. Also, each language has its own conventions, and the suggestions of this post are just for English writing practices. Finally, my focus is more on the academic side of the conventions. In that regard, after Crafting a Thesis Statement, wrong Word Choices and inefficient Paragraphing are the most common mistakes I’ve encountered in people’s writings. So, let’s talk shortly about wording, phrasing, and paragraphing in academic and professional writing.

Wording

“Wording” is a term I am using here liberally. It refers to the choice of words and their diversity. It also covers their collocations and their effect on the reader. Additionally, it includes practices to address these issues.

Word Choice & Collocations

I can say with confidence that after thesis statement problems, bad “word choice” (on par with bad “paragraph structure”) is the most common writing problem. While the thesis does not apply to professional writing, this one does. Therefore, it is safe to say that in non-academic professional writing “word choice” is the number one issue. But what is the problem and how can we fix it? The problem is usually one of three things: incompatibility of word with the phrase, wrong emotional load, and limited vocabulary.

First, you should always make sure that the words you use read well in the sentence. This is partially a matter of opinion, but also partially an objective (or conventional) element. The opinion aspect is a stylistic choice; it is what makes you the writer you are. The conventional one is related to the reader’s side; it is mostly (but not completely) related to sounds. Your word should be a conventional word. The reader expects to see it in the context of the writing. However, it should also “sound” good. It means you should re-read your sentences to certify words that add up progressively do not create undesirable or hard sounds. For example, in the previous sentence: 1) “re-read” is not desirable with repetition of /ri/ sound, 2) “add up progressively” is hard to read, unnecessarily long and two /p/ sounds following each other, and 3) certify is just not conventionally a word we use in this context. “Certify” also does not match the tone of a blog post. A well-chosen word considers the tone, the level of formality, and the audience.

Second, you need to consider the word “collocations” in English. Not every word can sit well with every other word. Possibly, you cannot find any hard and fast rule about it grammatically. However, the conventions of English speakers provide a pragmatic context. Some words come together more frequently, some “can” come together at the discretion of the writer, and some just do not feel right. For example, imagine the word “light”. It is common for it to be described as “bright light” or come in the phrase “to shed light on”. However, it sounds weird if I say “refulgent light” or use the phrase “drop light on”. This is while “refulgent” and “bright” are synonyms, as are “shed” and “drop”. This problem specifically occurs in the writings of people who acquired English as a foreign language and are not native speakers.

Conclusively, correct work choice and correct collocations lead you towards avoiding repetition. This is a big problem. It signals limited vocabulary. This is never received well in academic or professional writing, specifically in humanities and social science contexts. I usually say that as a rule of thumb (and not Gospel truth), you should have at least 2-3 sentence intervals between repetitions. In other words, if you use the word “light” in a sentence, make sure to write at least two full sentences before using it again in the third sentence. But what if you really need to refer to the idea of “light” in those two sentences? In academic writing, there are two possibilities. If it is an irreplaceable technical term, there is no choice but to repeat it. Alternatively, you can restructure your sentence order. However, in official writing where there is no terminology restriction, there is no justification for repetition. Both in professional writing and academic writing where the repeated word is not irreplaceable, you should find a good synonym. This brings me to the next section.

Thesaurus & Connotations

In order to avoid repetition, you need to find synonyms. Obviously, the traditional way of doing that is with dictionaries. Before the digital age, there used to be “Thesaurus” books, but they were barely better than a good dictionary. However, starting with MS Windows and the Internet becoming commonplace in the 1990s, personal computers offered us many tools. These tools are sometimes better than a dictionary. The most famous online tool is the website https://www.thesaurus.com. Yet, MS Word has an internally built thesaurus which works just as well, and is faster to use if you are a Microsoft user. By using a thesaurus, you find synonyms for the words you don’t want to repeat. However, it is a blessing and a curse. When choosing a synonym, you should consider everything mentioned above (sounds, collocations, etc.) as well as the “connotation” of the word. Simply replacing a word with the synonym you find can end up being disastrous.

Some may ask, what is the “connotation” of words? It is the emotional, cultural, and implied meanings associated with the denotation (dictionary meaning) of each word. I had this discussion with students a few times. For example, one of them had described a court case about murder using the adjective “captivating”. It is problematic because the denotation of captivating is “capable of attracting and holding interest.” However, the emotion connected to this “attraction” is extremely positive for the average English speaker. Using it for a murder case is a poor word choice for that reason. It just does not sit well. Meanwhile, for describing a motivational speaker, “captivating” makes sense, as does “engrossing” (neutral) and “enthralling” (negative) for the murder case. I used to think this is also a problem significantly more common in people whose native language is not English. However, I realized through experience that it is even common in many native speakers. This happens if they are not book readers or avid media consumers (and thus have a limited vocabulary and a vague understanding of connotations). Therefore, while it is important to use a vast vocabulary, you should always be sure of the connotations. Whether you come up with a word or you find it in a thesaurus, check if the emotional and cultural associations are right. Dictionaries usually mention if a word has a positive or negative connotation (specifically if it is a strong one). But an online search will also provide you with answers in forums and Language websites.

All of these are aspects of choosing the right word. While they are general suggestions and main things to consider, at the end of the day, you are the author. Many times, you may even be unsure about a word before thinking about any of these concerns. It might have happened to you that you just feel a word does not “feel right”, but you do not know how to remedy that. I can say two things. This time, they are not based on my experience as a writing tutor. They are based on my personal practice. First, whenever you do any of the practices above which lead to using a new word, make a mental note of that word. It is not just enough to know the word, as you probably already knew it before checking the thesaurus. You want it to be your active vocabulary, and you want to be aware of its connotations. Second, in my creative writing, although totally different from academic or professional writing, I have developed a personal trick. When I feel a word does not “feel right”, I come up (myself) with 3-5 substitute words. They can be synonyms or words very closely related in meaning. Then I check these 3-5 words for synonyms and connotations. During this process, I find at least one synonym for all or most of the 3-5 words over 70% of the time. If the connotation is correct, it’s possibly what I am looking for. The similarity shared by all or most of my substitute words shows a common trait. This word with the shared aspect must feel more “right” than each word individually. I use this mostly for poetry or fiction writing. It might not work for academic writing “all the time”, but it is a personal method I devised which can help you “sometimes”.

Phrasing

“Phrasing” is also used liberally here. It refers to the groups of words that are syntactically related and the way they make better sense. It also covers the connection of these groups to form a complete sentence and the grammatical concerns associated with sentences. Additionally, it includes practices related to the necessary qualities of a good sentence.

Phrase Structure & Qualities

Phrases are groups of words that are not a full sentence. In English, any sentence is comprised of an argument and a predicate (see the next section). A phrase, broadly speaking, is an argument with no predicate or an incomplete predicate without an argument. So, more broadly, a phrase is part of a sentence because, unlike a sentence, it does not convey a full idea. Grammatically speaking, most parts of speech can form a phrase around them: Noun Phrase, Prepositional Phrase, Verb Phrase, etc. Put it in less technical terms, most words can be the centre piece of a phrase. So, the structure of a phrase is a group of words related to a central word when either the argument or the predicate is missing. For example, a “Participial Phrase” (where a past participle or a present participle comes as an adjective) usually begins with a participle and forms an incomplete predicate. An instance of this is the italicised phrases within these two sentences: (1) “Throwing rocks across the water, my brother smiled.” (“Throwing” as present participle, a subjective adjective that describes the action of the brother as the subject of the sentence) (2) “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English, is considered a literary masterpiece”. (“Written” as past participle, an objective adjective that describes a quality of the object as additional information to the main sentence.)

While getting into the structural details of all kinds of phrases takes a much longer post, there is a set of rules and qualities you should have in mind about your phrases. First, decide your punctuation based on whether the phrase is “essential” or “non-essential”. It also determines the placement of the phrase within the sentence. Essential phrases are phrases without which the sentence loses its meaning (Example #1 above). Non-essential phrases merely add to the meaning, but the sentence is still valid without them (Example #2 above). Here, some may even bring up the difference between phrases and clauses (a subcategory of phrases). Second, always ask yourself if a non-essential phrase makes your sentence clearer or longer. If the answer is not a certain “clearer”, you are probably providing unnecessary phrases. Third, if you are dealing with rhetorical phrases (used for making the text more beautiful or relatable), their placement shows their quality. Usually, the ones that you put at the beginning of the sentence (e.g., “In a nutshell, …”) tend to be more essential (and clarifying). The more it moves towards the end (e.g. “… two wrongs making a right, …”), the more probable they will be less essential (and unnecessary). Fourth, phrases can come as pre-position, ad-position, or post-position. Simply put, they can be at the beginning (e.g., “While implementing this experiment, …”), in the middle (e.g., “…, in order to save time, …”), or towards the end (e.g., “…, considering the affecting factors.”) of the sentence. It is not always easy to judge if any of them are more essential than the others. Yet, it is advisable to avoid using essential phrases as ad-position (middle) and preferably use them at the beginning or the end of the sentence. Fifth, and finally, as phrases are a group of words connected to a core, the core word decides the placement and length of the phrase. By correct recognition of the core word, you enable yourself to do two things. You place the phrase in the right part of the sentence based on the grammatical role of the phrase (e.g. Subjective Phrase, Adverbial Phrase, etc.). You can also shorten the unnecessarily long phrases by removing the words that have less important connections to the core (“While implementing this experiment, …” can be “During this experiment”, since the core idea is “experiment” and the time duration is less central, so it can be shortened).

Sentence Structure & Length

As said above, an English sentence has two main components: the Argument & the Predicate. The simplest example of this is Subject + Verb Phrase, like “Academic writing + increases critical thinking.” Of course, an argument can be a much more complicated noun phrase, and in some cases, it may not even contain a subject, but it always establishes the main focus of whatever idea the verb is going to discuss. Predicates can also take multiple forms and have much longer structures. At the end of the day, you need to make sure that your sentence has at least these five qualities: First, it must have a point that it wants to make (argument), usually in the form of telling someone’s (subject) action or something’s (object) being affected in a way. Second, you have to be very careful about “Subject-Verb Agreement”. Missing this point is an extremely common mistake in writing, even amongst native speakers. Third, if your subject consists of singular nouns connected with “or”, you need a singular verb. Also, if it is a collective noun referring to a group of people (e.g. “The Committee”), it requires a plural verb, while when it is a collective noun referring to one entity of several people (e.g. “The CNN”), it usually comes with a singular verb. Fourth, it must have a verb to be a full sentence, and the verb cannot be the first word in a grammatical sentence. Fifth, if you have more than one verbal phrase, you have to follow “parallelism”; it means your verbs should be in the same tense/form.

In terms of general structure, the word order of the predicate is always “… + Adverb + Verb + Object + …”. While other elements can come before the adverb or after the object, these elements are so common that you need to consider them as the cornerstone of your sentence structure after your argument (usually the Subject). Moreover, even if your argument is not a simple subject (e.g., Passive Sentences, Questions, etc.) or your predicate has many components other than the verb (e.g., Complement, Auxiliaries, Prepositional Phrases, etc.), a correct and fully-formed sentence always needs both of them. When a sentence lacks a valid argument or a complete predicate, we are dealing with a “sentence fragment”. Having these structural points in mind, you should be careful not to let your sentence turn into a fragment, nor should it expand into what is usually called a “run-on sentence”. A run-on sentence is when you could divide a sentence into two separate thoughts without adding, rearranging or removing a single word. Correct use of punctuation and not connecting multiple arguments and predicates will help you avoid this. An academic sentence is usually between 15-25 words. If, for justified reasons, you need to make it a little shorter or longer, you must still keep it within the 10-30-word range. Anything shorter or longer than that is either a fragment/run-on sentence, or becomes automatically vague because of being too short/long.

Paragraphing

“Paragraphing” is a more common mistake than any of the above concepts. It is also the most important of all. “Paragraphing” involves dividing writing into independent but connected chunks. These are groups of sentences focused on a single idea or topic, which are also in harmony with other groups. It is the practice of creating these independent structures from basic components. “Paragraphing” also ensures the coherence of the whole text and its comprehensibility for the reader. Additionally, it includes practices to address the issues that can negatively affect readability or coherence.

TO BE COMPLETED BY EARLY-NOVEMBER

Paragraph Structure & Components

TO BE COMPLETED WITH

Components of a paragraph (Topic, Body, Conclusive sentences)

Mini Essay Analogy (relationship of components and ordering body sentences)

How to divide the text into paragraphs (length?)

Paragraph Length & Transitions

TO BE COMPLETED WITH

The length of a standard academic paragraph and flexibilities

Qualities leading to Coherence

Tips for better transition