This is the first in a series of writing hacks for Millar College of the Bible students.
The End Goal: Repeatable Steps
Academic writing has a very consistent format. The best way to improve both the production speed and quality of your academic writing is to understand its algorithms.
An algorithm is a series of repeatable steps that you do the same way every time. The algorithms of academic writing include the general contents of a paper, as well as the grammar and language style.
You can learn to do papers like you do a familiar, habitual set of movements. The challenge is to figure out which of your steps already work, which are slowing you down, and which ones you can add to make less work for yourself instead of more.
The Tools: Basics for All Writing
For many years, I wrote a blog presenting theological articles and creative nonfiction vignettes. Those are two very different styles… for the most part. One involves analytical presentation of an idea or theme. The other involves giving the reader a way to experience the idea or theme through narrative techniques.
In all the types of writing I’ve done, the same foundations were necessary:
- Know how to write the clearest sentence possible.
- How many words is that, on average?
- Which parts of speech/language, in which order?
- Where do sentences start and stop?
- Know how to gather up and group related ideas.
- Related sentences are called a paragraph.
- Related paragraphs are called an essay, a paper, a story, or an article.
- A series of related essays, stories or articles is called a book. (It’s that simple… in theory.)
- Know that it’s okay to move sentences and paragraphs around so the groupings are as sensible as possible.
- Know that if things can’t be moved around to make them sensible, either something is missing or something doesn’t belong.
Believe it or not, that’s all. Even in academic writing, these are the principles that confuse writers. The rest is a matter of details. This is because English is actually two languages: One spoken, one written.
The Start: From Spoken to Written
Making the shift from your “speaking voice” to your “writing voice” is a gradual process. Humans pick up some 70% of meaning through unspoken body language, vocal tone, or layers of shared understandings of word meanings (semantics).
Writing forces us to re-examine our sense of shared understanding. The common phrases we use to communicate that shared meaning through vocal tone are meaningless on paper.
Try reading these in a kind tone, then in a debating tone:
- If you think about it
- Well, but also
- This gave me the idea that
- I feel like it’s
- The thing that really shook me
- It was so sick that
- It seems like
- In a way
- But if you look at it
- Or something like that
- I’m really sure that
- The coolest thing about it is
- On the other hand
If you didn’t bother reading them out loud, what happened? Did your eye skip over them once you caught the pattern of them? (It’s a pattern of words that have no substance or meaning.)
Begin by Cutting Fillers
Spoken English is cluttered with meaningless filler words. These clichés serve a tonal purpose. We use them to create emotional authenticity and connection. They provide a pause to adjust our body language or allow others time to read our expression. They can also act as shorthand for shared cultural ideas.
In spoken English, we also show how passionate we are about a topic by speaking long extended even longer but more extended sentences without much punctuation, and making up for the length by just speaking faster, and if we’re writing we use another comma to jump to the next thought, and then we do the same thing again but with more words because we’re flying along so fast because it’s exciting or also because there’s five minutes to submission deadline.
That’s a viable tactic in a social media video.
On the written page… Thy masters mislike this, villein.*
Writing strips away all our verbalized and physically-expressed tone. Good news, though! We can replace those verbal habits with (different) written ones. Written authenticity—clear intent, clear passion, clear meaning—is a beast of a different kind.
What do you need to say?
After that, what more can you say?
Why not say it?
_______
*You can adjust the speed of your speech, but your instructors cannot adjust the playback speed of their eyeballs.
-Shakespeare, probably