Many faces of the writing

Writing can be for many purposes and they are all different. For a story writing or an anecdote, you have many adjectives for different things. For analytical essay, you have many judgements and reasoning words to piece up the logic. And for academic journal writing, you want to have plain language and fluent logic.

​ It is very interesting that in academic writing, you both want to avoid jargon and use jargon. You want to avoid jargon so that every reader understand what you wrote. Since everyone would have a slightly different background and the ramification of jargon abuse is confusion. However, the dark side of academic writing is, by using proper jargon, researchers from the same community would recognize each other and identify those who were not one of them because the unique luster of jargons speaks for them.

A good way to improve writing

The hard way is, of course, you want to write a lot. But the smart way to write a lot, I figured, is to defend yourself for every sentence you wrote. This means, you have to justify for every sentence.

The basic steps are:

  1. write something, say background for a research paper. They should be organized in such a way that an apparent logic is pronounced.

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  1. Under every sentence’s blank lines, write reasons for every sentence to exist: what are you trying to deliver? Why do you say this? What is the purpose of this sentence? What am I trying to deliver here? Will this cause confusion? Is there a better way of saying it?

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  1. Revise it. Compare the reasons you wrote and the sentence itself. Sometimes, you would find legitimate words/arguments in the reasoning and you could “promote” them to the sentence. Other times you may find a better way of saying that.

Reason why this is good

As a second language learner, I can feel that my brain reacts slower than my fingers. This means, when I was writing the first sentence, my brain is also, of course, working on the first sentence too. However, the brain needs more time to figure out the best expression for the meaning. So although I have recorded down the first expression I came up with already, my brain is still working on the first sentence. So actually, after the 2nd sentence is done or even the 3rd sentence is done, our brain is still working background on the 1st sentence and put its latest results in the “buffer” that we just not aware of (Yes, my brain is switching between the first sentence and the 3rd sentence. And this is called concurrency!). That’s why revising always gives you some better ideas.

Essentially, what we have done here is revising. But “revise” is a big and abstract word. For some reason, I more like an “action-oriented” expression, because an abstract concept may be understood differently by different people, therefore cause a communication problem. But to defense, yourself for every sentence, is clear enough for everyone.

And it is a natural way to write a lot.

(Contrary to my Chinese writing habit that often uses a single sentence as the beginning paragraph, I decided to use a single sentence as the ending paragraph in my English writings.)