Navigating Advanced Academic Writing and

Publication in English:
Inside Advice for Graduate Students and
Early Career Faculty
Center for Excellent Teaching and Learning, Peking University 北京大学
October 2024

Bradley Hughes, Director Emeritus, Faculty Program in Writing Across the Curriculum and Director Emeritus, The Writing Center
The University of Wisconsin-Madison USA [email protected] writing.wisc.edu/
Two perspectives I’ll be encouraging
• Looking at your writing from an • craftsmanship, doing the work,
aerial perspective, seeing the putting in the hours, building a
big picture, learning to talk paper brick by brick
about your writing rhetorically
谢谢!
• How much I appreciate your being here today
• How much I admire your great university
• How hard I know it is to do high-level academic writing in your
native language and even more difficult to do that in English as a
second or third language
My experience teaching writing and writing
teachers
• 44 years of experience
• 35 years directing one of the largest and most comprehensive writing centers in the
United States—110 people on staff, working with 7000+ student-writers each year;
individual tutorials, workshops, writing groups
• 5 years since retirement continuing to consult, evaluate programs, speak, conduct
research, publish, review mss. for journals . . . co-authored with many former graduate
students; have received numerous awards for my research publications
• trained thousands of graduate students and professors from disciplines
across my university and others to teach writing
• consulted with and evaluated writing centers at universities all over the U. S.
and in Europe, South America, South Asia, Central Asia, and East Asia
• And always a student of research writing in the sciences not only at my
university but also at home
• By bothering my daughter, who finished her PhD in immunobiology
at Yale University last year, to talk endlessly about how she and
her research group do their research writing and publication
• Despite the technical subject matter and data visualization, their
published papers follow many of the same principles we’ll be
talking about today!
If you are in the sciences, just in case you do not
think writing is important in your studies and career
• Professor Jo Handelsman, • “Writing is the most important
Director of the Wisconsin skill in science.”
Institute for Discovery, The
University of Wisconsin-
Madison
As we get started . . .
• A little about my university context for graduate-level and early-
career faculty writing
I’m visiting from Madison, Wisconsin, USA
The University of Wisconsin-Madison

▪ 52,000 students (37,000

undergraduates; 13,000
graduate and professional
students)
▪ 8000 international students
from over 120 countries
(3,700 from China)
▪ Of all U.S. universities, ranks
#8 in research spending ($1.4
billion/year)
▪ So lots of high-level research
writing!
 New School of Computer, Data and Information
Sciences under construction

Another College of Engineering Building

under construction
The IceCube Observatory in Antarctica

South African Large Telescope

About my lecture
• a mixture of theory (about, e.g., the relationship between writers and
readers of academic writing), advice, examples, stories, and
recommended readings to learn more
• practical and theoretical
• some for less-experienced academic writers and some for more advanced
• about a 75-minute presentation with time for your questions after
• Will move quickly through a lot of material, skipping some parts of
slides so that we have time for other topics. All of the material on the
slides will be available to you.
• If you want a copy of my slides, at the end of my presentation I’ll share
a link and QR code for you to access them.
Thinking about YOUR learning goals for your
graduate studies and career
• Really smart students and early career professors think about
what they want to learn; they don’t always wait to be told what
they will learn in a course; they set and then revisit and revise their
learning goals beyond any single course
• Please think for a minute about what you hope to learn as a
graduate student or professor at 北大. What might be in your top 5
learning goals for this year and next?
Is this on your list?
• Learning to become a really strong, successful, persuasive,
flexible, critical, nuanced, published writer ?
• In Chinese, in English, in German, in Japanese, in Thai, in Indonesian . . .
• It should be!
Think about the power you have as a research
writer
• Writing is power!
• Universities run on writing. Research universities are writing universities.
• And businesses, industry, government, non-profits, entrepreneurial enterprises,
communities, and think-tanks . . . all run on writing too.
• Writing is key to—
• learning and understanding and owning existing knowledge
• discovering new knowledge
• analyzing data and texts and histories and policies . . .
• funding research
• disseminating new knowledge
• articulating and supporting new theories
• effecting change in the world
• persuading others that you are right☺
• I want you to claim this power for yourselves! And I want you to be able to teach and share
this power with your students and your colleagues.
Think about the power you have as a research
writer . . .
• “Great writers teach us how to see.” –Historian Shelby Foote
• From your research, you have access to a world, one that your
readers do not yet know. There should be some joy in writing—you
truly should enjoy sharing your world with your readers.
• As a graduate student and as a faculty member, you will make
your living as a writer. . . .
An important affective dimension to writing
• writing for publication is always hard work and time consuming
• and it will be both—
• exhilarating, powerful, enjoyable
• and sometimes painful and humbling
The process of writing and publishing can be
enjoyable . . .
• pursuing a genuinely interesting research question, one you are excited
to learn more about, that you can sustain your interest in . . .
• talking with smart, interested colleagues about your emerging ideas
and hearing their questions about your ideas and findings and
arguments. . . .
• solving a complex intellectual problem, clarifying your central claim.
• finishing a paragraph, a section, an article. (I don’t always like writing,
but I like “having written.”)
• seeing your work in print and sharing it with colleagues and mentors
and friends and family should be exhilarating!
• joining a scholarly conversation in your field is exciting! Having other
researchers use, learn from, disagree with, and cite your work in theirs
is intellectually and emotionally very satisfying.
Even exhilarating: A sample from reviewers’
comments on one of my articles a few years ago . .
.
• From the editor of the journal: “As you will see, both reviewers found
this to be an exceptionally valuable article.”
• Reviewer #1
• “This article will be valuable reading for seasoned [readers], those new . . . , and
those who are planning to enter the field. . . . [then summarizes the main
argument from the study] Taken alone, this conclusion will be useful to all of us
in making arguments to administrators (and/or granting agencies) to fund our
faculty development efforts.”
• “But more than that, the authors’ findings also lead them to make some other
important, and perhaps unexpected . . . claims. Their findings . . . allow them to
make a strong argument about the nature and value of [disciplinary] expertise. . .
.”
• “I recommend publication with only minor revision.”
• Then six paragraphs of questions and critique.
• Then Reviewer #2, who had a similar response☺.
And often humbling: Reviewer’s comments on
another submission of mine . . .
• “I was initially very excited to see this study. . . The topic is central to
___ Journal and readers will be very interested in this analysis. . . .”
• “However, as I was reading, I sometimes felt like I was just reading a
data-dump of all 107 responses organized by loose themes. . . .”
• Followed by 2 ½ pages of suggestions for what I should do in
revisions☺.
• The other reviewer and the editors were interested in publishing it.
• My initial reaction. . . . But then after some more reflection, I realized
that this reviewer made some good points, and I did some substantial
revisions, but also did not change some other key parts and defended
my choices.
• humbling and exhilarating . . .
Our journey today

understanding crafting shaping increasing

improving
key concepts effective, purposeful your
style in
about inviting literature productivity
academic
academic introductions reviews as a research
writing
writing writer
Part 1: Understanding Key Concepts
about Academic Writing
Conceptualizing high-level academic writing
• Time for just a few key concepts:
• rhetoric
• process
• genre
• reducible arguments
Writing well requires thinking rhetorically
• rhetoric=how to write effectively to inform and persuade your readers
• requires thinking about—
• readers /audience (Who are my intended readers? What do they already know
about my topic? What do they not yet know or believe?)
• advanced academic writing is like a conversation (Burkean parlors)
• you’re joining an already existing conversation with smart people who are interested in
your topic and who appreciate new ideas, new arguments . . .
• what do you have to say? How can you fit into that conversation?
• what’s your news??
• purpose(s) of your writing (to inform? persuade? inspire action?)
• your message (your main idea; the news from your research; your key finding;
your new theory; your interpretation of data, historical events, complex texts . . .)
In every piece of writing . . .
• There’s a struggle going on between writers and readers—
• Each one is trying to do the least amount of work
• And the responsibility for doing more of the work, for making
readers’ jobs easier, falls on you!
Writing well requires an extended process
• Successful academic writers understand that writing is an extended process,
involving lots of revision and talk about your ideas, goals
• Writing is generative and heuristic; it’s integral to the research process. NOT just
some late stage when you “write it up” after reading and gathering data endlessly.
• Writing improves research and analysis and thinking by forcing us to make organize
our ideas, make connections, focus arguments, support those arguments with
evidence and data.
• Your draft writing offers a window into your thinking: if you can’t write your ideas and
arguments clearly, logically, and persuasively and if you can’t explain ideas in ways
that are sophisticated enough for your field and for readers, you may not yet
understand them fully.
• Talk about emerging ideas and about drafts with smart, critical, encouraging
colleagues and mentors are crucial parts of the process. Academic writing is
actually dialogic, a form of talk and thinking externalized.
Writing well requires understanding common
genres in your academic discipline
• Thinking about the rhetorical work that these genres do for readers—
• research proposals
• review articles
• theoretical papers
• experimental research papers
• historical analyses
• literary analyses
• case studies
• methods papers
• squibs in linguistics . . .
• What are their goals, what work do they do? Who are they designed for? What
do readers expect in them? How do they function in building knowledge in a
discipline?
• What do they assume their readers already know, what doesn’t need saying?
As you plan your paper, think carefully about
the genre you’re writing
• As a student and a new faculty researcher, you can learn a lot about writing
for publication by doing a rhetorical analysis of a few high-quality published
articles.
• Look in your target journals for articles that match your genre, that have
some similarities with your research topics, questions, and methods.
• Topic? Research questions? What is a big enough project for one article?
Methods? Kinds of analysis? What’s the news? What claims or arguments??
Overall length? How many figures? What story does it tell about its figures?
Length of sections? Organization and heading and subheadings?
Assumptions about readers? Use of theory? . . .
• Analyze more than one sample article.
• Don’t expect perfect matches or templates. Look for principles and options.
Influential papers have a strong, clear,
memorable reducible argument*
• Signal your main finding/claim, argument in your title and express it in a
single sentence or two—your overall main point.
• Given all the complexity and details in your paper and how much you
know, this is difficult to do.
• Your main point, your reducible argument, your main finding, is all that
many readers will remember from your paper and associate with your
name and research.
• Tissue-specific modifier alleles determine Mertk loss-of-function traits (Akalu, Y.
T. et al. (eLife, 2022).
• Always historicize! (Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act, 1981).

• *Smagorinsky & Smith (1999), Reading, writing, and reciprocity, Research in the Teaching of English, 34, 193-196.
Part 2: Crafting Effective, Inviting
Introductions
• Please think for a minute about answers to this question:
• What work does the introduction to a research paper/article need to do
for readers?
• Strong academic writers are always thinking rhetorically!
The rhetorical work of an introduction: what questions
do readers want an introduction to answer?
• What is the primary topic of this research?
• What is interesting, intriguing about this research? How do the authors spark readers’
interest and curiosity?
• What are the key things that are already known about this topic?
• What is the gap or problem in what’s already known? What is the exigency for this research?
• What is the significance of this topic, its contribution? Why does it matter?
• narrow, focused significance
• broader significance
• What are the main research questions this paper answers?
• What’s a brief version of the methods?
• Purpose?
• In brief, what are the main findings or claims?
• How is the body of the article organized?◊
Think of your introduction as promises to your
readers, introducing your specific topic and
exigency for new research, and key findings
• Readers like it when promises are fulfilled in the body of the paper.
Creating a research space (CaRS) in your
introduction
• In introductions, you can create a research space for your article by:
• establishing a TERRITORY (what your new research is generally about).
• introducing the CURRENT STATE OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THAT TOPIC
• CREATING a GAP (what is NOT yet known, has NOT yet been studied, what has
not yet been built or solved OR A PROBLEM in the current knowledge)
• FILLING the GAP—presenting, introducing the new research
• Signaling the SIGNIFICANCE or CONTRIBUTION of your new research—WHY is
this important? To the field? To theory? To solving a problem? To policy? To
improving x? (Remember that just because something has not been studied is
not always a sufficient or persuasive justification for new research.)
• Or with some research, follow a problem solution template.

• Adapted from Khaw & Tan (2018); Reineke et al. (2018); Swales & Feak (2004).
Khaw & Tan (2018) PSP (problem-solution
pattern) with CaRS Model in Engineering RAs
Jin, Guangsa, Li, Chenle, & Sun, Ya. (2020). Exploring the macrostructure
of research articles in economics. IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication, 63(3), 227-243.

New Categories Examples of new function headings

Background Background, historical background
Theoretical model Conceptual framework, theoretical background and hypotheses,
framework, theoretical framework, theory, the model, setup
Econometric model Estimation, identification, calibration, empirical strategy, model and
baselines assumptions
Robustness Robustness, alternatives, alternative hypotheses
Mechanism Mechanisms, examining causal channels
Application Application, simulations, empirical applications, empirical
implementation, policy experiments, illustrations
Some examples of direct, explicit rhetorical
work in introductions
• from the social sciences, sciences, and engineering
Illustration of identifying a GAP in the introduction
to a paper from operations research
• “Most of the existing literature on HLP [hub location problems] has
studied the above problem [network design problem faced by an
entrant] in a monopolistic setting, without accounting for the
presence of competing firms in the market. . . .”

• From Richa Tiwari, Sachin Jayaswal, & Ankur Sinha. (2020). Alternate solution
approaches for competitive hub location problems. European Journal of Operational
Research.
Illustration of a identifying a GAP in the
introduction in management research
• “Within the ecosystem services framework, there has been
limited work on developing a systematic understanding of urban
commons (Fish, 2011).”
Illustration of a identifying a GAP in the
introduction, in biochemistry/immunology
• “Our previous structural work revealed. . . . However, it is not clear
whether the ZAR1 oligomer also adopts a pentameric
configuration in the plant cell. More importantly, the precise
biochemical function of the ZAR1 resistosome remains to be
elucidated. It is not clear whether the ZAR1 resistosome pore
directly disrupts cellular membranes or acts as an ion channel
that first triggers intracellular signaling prior to cell killing.” (Cell
184, June 2021, p. 2529)
Illustration of contribution/significance of
current research
• “Our research contributes in three main ways. First, we contribute to literature on
consumer access to resources as determined by availability and regulatory
constraints. . . .”
• “Second, we contribute to the growing literature that evaluates the role of
government policy (for example, Qu and Ennew, 2005) across various domains. Our
research addresses the question of implementation and expansion of a new public
policy in a context where various stakeholders form a negotiated ecosystem. . . .”
• “Finally, our findings corroborate the econometric explanation provided by
Mukherjee et al. (2017) on the role of habit formation in gold demand, especially for
the gold jewelry demand in India.”

• Priya Narayanan, et al. (2020), Understanding the government’s attempt to transform attitudes towards a
critical resource: Gold monetization in India. Resources Policy, 66.
Remember this crucial principle about helping
readers follow complex ideas: go from old → new.
• As a general principle, go from old, familiar, known, established
information to new, unknown information—
• within the introduction and within sections of an article
• within sentences

• Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 12th ed.
(2017)
Old → New in the introduction to a computer
engineering paper
• By researchers from Zhejiang University; the first author is a PhD
student
Introduces topic (the memory
management subsystem of
computer operating systems)
which is OLD, known, familiar
information to readers

The problem, what’s new, what

this paper is about—memory
management subsystems are
difficult to operate and maintain;
constant battles for programmers
My rhetorical analysis of the introduction to a
published sample in the social sciences
• Noronha et al. (2020), Navigating embeddedness (organizational
behavior).
 establishing a territory:
more territory, background:
background for the new
the economic significance of
research—GCCs, GVCs-
GPNs
>GPNs

1A

creating a gap: most of the

GPN research has focused
on lead firms in the Global
North
the entire article starts with
old, familiar, established
information for readers of
this journal: GCCs, GVCs-
>GPNs
 more creating the gap: GPN
research has focused
exclusively on
manufacturing, ignoring IT
and business outsourcing
sectors

establishing the significance

of filling this gap, doing
research on what’s been
ignored: highly skilled
outsourcing sectors
 presenting the new research
site; filling the gap: Indian IT
suppliers operating in the
Netherlands; and shifting
focus
from lead firms to suppliers
introducing the
research questions

introducing the core

theoretical concept for
this study:
embeddedness; and
giving a roadmap for the
structure of the article
Foreground your ideas in topic sentences
• Because many readers only skim articles, help readers see YOUR
ideas by putting your ideas, your argument, your logic in topic
sentences—the first sentence of many paragraphs.
Illustration of foregrounding/emphasizing authors’
own ideas: subheadings as outline and argument
(from the Bi et al., 2021, article in Cell)
• Results
• The ZAR1 complex possesses channel activity in Xenopus oocytes in a manner
dependent on Glu11
• The ZAR1 resistosome possesses cation-selective channel activity in planar
lipid-bilayers
• The ZAR1 resistosome channel is permeable to Ca2+
• ZAR1 triggers Ca2+ influx in the plant cell in a manner dependent on Glu11
• Single-molecule imaging reveals ZAR1 pentameric oligomers in the plant cell
• The ZAR1 resistosome can be localized in the PM
• Activation of ZAR1 leads to a rapid loss of PM integrity and abrupt cell rupture
• Activation of ZAR1 perturbs organelles and induces ROS production prior to cell
death
Part 3: Writing Purposeful Literature
Reviews
Advice about literature reviews
• Please think for a minute about answers to this question:
• What are two or three of the most important things an effective literature
review needs to do?
Disciplinary and genre differences in how
published literature is used in research papers
• humanities
• social sciences
• science and engineering
• In some disciplines, in some genres
• there is a separate literature review section
• in others, the literature review is subsumed into the introduction
• in others, there is no separate, substantial literature review; only a brief
characterization of previous work on that topic; specific findings,
arguments, and methods from published literature appear only where
they are topically relevant to the points authors are making
Writing literature reviews—a summary and
analysis of the current state of knowledge about a
topic—can be challenging!
• a challenge to organize, to be comprehensive and detailed enough
but selective, to be fair, to be efficient, to keep your voice and
points/argument/story as author primary, to be persuasive . . .
• It’s NOT an exhaustive summary of ALL that’s been published, all
that’s known about a topic
• It’s YOUR shaping of that summary, your analysis of it that sets up
your new research study, ideas, solution . . .
• Images and metaphors that doctoral students use to describe the
process of writing literature reviews:
• Images of being lost, drowning, and confused
• It’s like “eating a live elephant”
• “persuading an octopus into a jar”
• From Kamler & Thomson (2014) and Sword (2017)
As you read articles for your review, take notes in a
spreadsheet or in a reference manager.
• Work toward themes and groupings. Remember that a central
function of a lit review is comparison and contrast.
Critical questions to help plan a literature
review
• Which concepts (abstract nouns) are under study and what are the
main findings about those concepts in published literature?
• What’s your story, about the literature, what’s your main
argument/claim about the current state of knowledge about this topic?
Make an argument that your study is necessary. Do NOT just plod
chronologically through study after study.
• What’s a logical order to sequence the (sub)topics whose research you
are reviewing and to support your argument/claim?
• Within each topic, which literature will help your readers understand
the new research and demonstrate your knowledge of the field? How
selective and relevant are your choices?
• How fair and comprehensive and current is your representation?
Literature reviews in student papers vs.
published research articles
Student paper/thesis/dissertation Published research article
• comprehensive, long . . . • more selective, strategic . . . to
• has a situated purpose, a demonstrate, briefly, to
learning goal: helping you specialists in the field, your
understand that literature and mastery of the literature and to
persuading your professors who justify and provide analytical
read your thesis that you have frameworks for your new study
identified, read, understood, and
can present coherently and
clearly all/most of the relevant
literature
Excerpt from a well-organized lit review in the
social sciences (management)
Does an excellent job of funneling down
to the topic under study. Also shapes our
understanding of the literature (e.g., “The
literature on . . . has traditionally
branched into addressing two questions .
. .”). Consistently focuses on main
ideas/arguments from the literature
(instead of focusing on particular
authors).
To learn more about literature reviews . . .
• See the good annotated examples in Petchko, How to write about
economics and public policy, 2018, Chapter 12.
For science writers: beyond the literature
review to the results and discussion sections
• Excellent advice for scientists about many
elements of scientific papers.
• Heard, S. B. (2022). The scientist’s guide to
writing: How to write more easily and
effectively throughout your scientific
career (2nd ed.). Princeton University
Press.
For example, Heard (2022) on organizing your
results section
• “When your data and analyses are fairly simple, you do well to
place the main result (the one that most directly answers your
central research question) in the first paragraph.”
• “The main-result-first organization isn’t feasible, however, for
papers that make more complex arguments. Often your ‘main’
result is a synthesis of several lines of evidence, or involves
building later analyses on the results of earlier ones.” (p. 106)
Want to reinforce from this section
• I want you to understand and feel comfortable talking about the rhetorical
terms for the work that gets done in introductions and literature reviews.
• What research says differentiates experienced, successful writers from
novice writers:
• the ability to talk about writing purposefully, systematically
• to take an aerial view, to talk about the big picture . . .
• what those sound like:
• “What I’m trying to do in this section is . . .”
• “I’ve organized this section in this way because . . .”
• “Here’s where I’m trying to identify a gap in knowledge/ research/ . . . or a problem in this previous
research . . .”
• “I need a better explanation of significance/ contributions/ justification.”
• Listen critically to yourself—and for those of you who are teaching and
mentoring researchers, to your students: how clearly and purposefully do
you/they talk about their writing?
Part 4: Managing Your Time and
Being Productive with Research
Writing
• Please think for a minute about answers to this question:
• How can you make time for writing, how can you be productive as a research
writer?
• Quick advice—
• develop a big-picture schedule for a writing project
• commit to giving a conference presentation or poster; deadlines can really help
• share your deadlines with your adviser or co-author and ask them to help you
keep them
• schedule time for writing
• talk about your writing while it’s in progress
• find helpful writing mentors
• join (or create) a serious writing group
Successful academic writers increase their productivity and
satisfaction by scheduling writing time—and protecting that time
Silvia, P. (2019). How to write a lot: A
practical guide to productive
academic writing. 2nd ed. APA Press.

Sword, H. (2017). Air &

light & time & space: How
successful academics
write. Harvard University
Press.
Scheduling time for writing
Wednesday, 周三 • writing regularly, multiple times a
9:00-10:00--Teaching
week
10:00-11:00—Office Hours
• setting goals for each block of
writing time: breaking a big complex
11:00-1:00--Writing project that easily seems
1:00-2:00—Lunch and Walk overwhelming, even impossible,
into manageable chunks
2:00-6:00—Lab Research
• protecting that writing time—NOT
available for meetings then; use that
time ONLY for writing
• eliminate distractions (no email, no
phone, no web browsing, no social-
media updates . . .)
• holding yourself accountable
Why schedule time for writing and force
yourself to stick to that schedule?
• One of my favorite cartoons about writing has the answer . . .
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
By Grant Snider, The
New York Times, 10
July 2020.
 Wendy Laura Belcher. (2019). Writing your journal
article in twelve weeks: A guide to academic
publishing success. 2nd ed. Univ. of Chicago Press.
Assumes that you are revising a paper that you have already written.

Week Task Week Task

1 Designing your plan for writing 8 Presenting your evidence
2 Advancing your argument 9 Strengthening your structure
3 Abstracting your article 10 Opening and concluding your article
4 Selecting a journal 11 Editing your sentences
5 Refining your works cited 12 Sending your article!
6 Crafting your claims for significance X Revising and resubmitting your
article
7 Analyzing your evidence
Choose to talk about your writing in progress
• TALK is a crucial part of the writing process!
• Successful writers talk about their writing in progress—
• about topics and questions for research
• about their reading
• about concepts
• about their research design
• about their data
• about their emerging analysis, claims
• about their outlines
• about their drafts
• about their reviews
• about their revisions . . .
Find mentors to talk about your research
writing with
• find several strong mentors for your research writing and publishing
• professors who are experienced publishing
• peers
• students and colleagues who are ahead of you in their careers
• but not just professors who will rewrite what you write or just tell you what to
write or just criticize everything you write
• Find mentors who will listen carefully to your ideas and interests; ask you
challenging questions about your research topic and deepen your thinking;
who will help you analyze samples; talk through the frame, story, and
organization for your paper; let you practice articulating your main points;
teach you why to write and revise in certain ways; motivate and encourage
you to do the hard work of writing and revising . . .
Heard (2022) has excellent advice about
revision and friendly reviews
The social dimension of writing really matters;
talk about writing in progress really matters
Glad to talk in the Q and A about . . .
● creating and sustaining a serious writing group
● sharing drafts with professors and peers
● responding to journal editors when you receive a “revise and
resubmit” or “accept with revisions” decision
● learning to give good feedback to colleagues about their drafts
● writing collaboratively/co-authoring
● using GenAI
Part 5: Improving Style in Your
Research Writing
Helping Readers Understand and
Appreciate Your Smart Ideas
What is style in writing? It’s about
• Not what we say in writing but how we say it.
• Not about grammatical rights and wrongs, but about . . .
• Choices we have for—
• structuring sentences and texts
• language, word choice
• connecting sentences . . .
• Making your readers’ jobs easier. Helping them understand, process, and remember
your smart ideas.
• In every piece of writing, there’s a struggle going on between writers and readers. Each one is
trying to do the least amount of work.
• Engaging your readers. Being efficient in your writing. Power. Grace. Beauty.
Individual voice.
• This is a big topic. I usually teach about and have students practice with for 4-6
weeks. Just a sample today and suggestions for how to learn more.
The architecture of sentences and of paragraphs and the
particulars of word choice really matter in academic writing!
• But only after clarifying your
• focus
• research questions
• methods
• theoretical lens
• data
• review of existing research
• central arguments
• evidence
• logic
• organization . . .
There is, of course, no single right or best
style.
• But there are some good principles for improving style in dense
academic writing in English.
• This is all about helping guide readers through complex, dense
information, analyses, and arguments.
• Reading is an act of forgetting. . . . As writers, your job is to help
readers grasp and remember your main point in a sentence easily,
before they move on to the next.
Time for 3 key concepts for improving style
1. When possible, try to have concrete actors or agents as subjects and
strong verbs in your sentences.
2. Try to limit nominalizations in your writing. Use only essential ones, those
that are common terminology in your field
▪ nominalization=a verb turned into a noun

verb nominalization
to classify classification
to optimize optimization
to perform performance
to maximize maximization
to consolidate consolidation

3. Help readers by putting your main point in a tight grammatical core.

A quick example of terrible style: How to
make an English sentence unreadable
1. Jim kicks Bill.
2. Bill is being kicked by Jim.
3. There is a kicking interaction taking place between Jim and Bill.
4. This is the kind of situation in which Jim is the kicker and Bill is the
kickee.

A concrete actor disappears. The verb weakens. Nominalizations

proliferate.

• From Richard Lanham, Revising Prose.

Recognizing nominalizations and weak
subjects and verbs in academic writing
Where do you see nominalizations in this sentence?
What is the main subject? The main verb?
Too many prepositional phrases?

“The involvement of the state needs to be through formulation and

implementation of appropriate policies for management of urban
commons based on high-quality data.”

▪ From Shah, A., & Garg, A. (2017). Urban commons service generation, delivery, and
management: A conceptual framework. Ecological Economics 135, 280-287.
Nominalizations in yellow; main verb in blue;
prepositional phrases in green
“The involvement of the state needs to be through formulation and
implementation of appropriate policies for management of urban
commons based on high-quality data.”

How could you revise this? We need to create a stronger subject

and action first—who’s doing what?
Some possible revisions
“The involvement of the state needs to be through formulation and
implementation of appropriate policies for management of urban
commons based on high-quality data.”

Possible revisions that reduce nominalizations, strengthen verbs and subjects, and reduce the
number of prepositional phrases:
Option 1: The state should get involved by formulating and
implementing appropriate policies for managing urban commons
based on high-quality data.
Option 2: Using high-quality data, the state can formulate and
implement effective policies for managing urban commons.
Tighten grammatical cores
• No matter how long your sentences are, aim to have a fairly
compact or tight grammatical core in most of your sentences.
• Grammatical core=the independent clause; the main statement; the
simple sentence; the subject and main verb (and object).
• To guide readers through longer, more complex sentences:
• Move some (less central) information into introductory, interrupting, or
concluding clauses and phrases, separate from the grammatical core
• use grammatical parallelism
What’s the grammatical core here?
• “The responses of the two groups of parents on items related to
parents’ Acceptance of Maternal Employment were rather similar
F(1,142) = .04, p = .85.”

• Borders, L. DiAnne, Lynda K. Black, and B. Kay Pasley. “Are Adopted Children and
Their Parents at Great Risk for Negative Outcomes?” Family Relations 47.3 (1998):
237-241.
The grammatical core is in red
• “The responses of the two groups of parents on items related to
parents’ Acceptance of Maternal Employment were rather similar
F(1,142) = .04, p = .85.”

• Borders, L. DiAnne, Lynda K. Black, and B. Kay Pasley. “Are Adopted Children and
Their Parents at Great Risk for Negative Outcomes?” Family Relations 47.3 (1998):
237-241.
Revised, improved version with a tighter
grammatical core
• [ORIGINAL] “The responses of the two groups of parents on items
related to parents’ Acceptance of Maternal Employment were
rather similar F(1,142) = .04, p = .85.”

• [REVISED] with part of the sprawling, long grammatical core

moved up front into an introductory phrase that is OUTSIDE of the
grammatical core]

• On items related to parents’ Acceptance of Maternal Employment,

the responses of the two groups were rather similar. . . .
For later reference, advice about style from the Writing
Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• No need to look now—just know
that a brief version of this advice
about improving style is available
there, on that website, 24/7/365
• writing.wisc.edu/handbook
Create a lively voice as writer: Don’t
write “a snowfall of words”
From Elizabeth Knoll, a former senior editor in the social
sciences at Harvard University Press, offered this advice about
style:

“I look for work that is interesting, stimulating, original,

provocative without being crackpot . . . and most of
all—and this is really important to me—sounding like it
was written by an actual human being and not cranked
out by some kind of machine for emitting academic
prose.”
“[Too many academic writers] are overcautious. They
take too long to get to the point, and they don’t quite
get to the point. They overexplain. They use too many
examples. They repeat themselves. . . . They muffle
themselves with too many words. It’s like the snowfall
that obliterates all the features of the landscape. A
snowfall of words that just cuts out any sound.”
(Sword, p. 189)
How exciting it is to publish your research!
A blog post I would strongly
recommend you read—very
thoughtful, smart, inspiring
reflections from a PhD
student about research
writing. Search on the web
for—
Hyonbin Choi, Another
Word, University of
Wisconsin-Madison Writing
Center, blog, cherished
view
Your comments and questions and
continuing this conversation . . .
On the next slide, I’ll share a QR code and link for accessing a copy of
all of my slides.

• After today if you have reactions and questions or if you’d like full bibliographic
information about sources I mentioned, please email me! I will always be eager to
hear from you and to help. Glad to chat on WeChat.

[email protected]
Brad Hughes
Director Emeritus, The Writing Center
Director Emeritus, Faculty Program in Writing Across the Curriculum
Department of English
The University of Wisconsin-Madison USA

谢谢!