Writing in the Sciences - Cut the Clutter

This is an overview over the first chapter of Writing in the Sciences offered by Stanford.

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what. These are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

– William Zinssler in On Writing Well, 1976

Cutting Extra words

Here are some common clutters:

• Dead-weight words and phrases such as ‘‘as it is well known’’, ‘‘as it has been shown’’
• Empty words and phrases: ‘‘important’’, ‘‘methodologic’’, ‘‘basic tenets of’’
  • Hedge words: appreciable changes. One may ask: ‘‘what is an appreciable change?’’ Hedge words intends to introduce ambiguity, probability, or indecisiveness.
• Long words or phrases that could be short: a majority of -> most, a number of -> many, ‘’neonatal population’’ -> ‘’newborns’’, etc.
• Unnecessary jargon and acronyms. No one wants to constantly look for what ‘‘miR’’ means
• Repetitive words or phrases: illustrate/demonstrate
• adverbs: very, really, generally, basically

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter

– Lettres provinciales, 16, Dec. 14, 1656

Little Tricks

Here are a few other small tricks:

• Get rid of negatives. The sentence usually becomes much clearer using the positive construction. ‘‘Not honest -> honest’’, ‘‘does not have -> lacks’’
• Eliminate superfluous uses of ‘’there is/are’’. For example, we can change the sentence ‘‘There are few single genes that can cause autism in isolation’’ to ‘‘Few single genes cause autism in isolation’’.
• Omit needless prepositions. For example, ‘’that’’ and ‘‘on’’ are often superfluous. This is useful to cut off words in abstract with word limitations. For example, you can simplify ‘’they agreed that it was true’’ to ‘’they agreed it was true’’.
• Use verbs than adjectives: protective for -> protect against.

Example

Here is an example sentence: ‘‘Clinical seizures have been estimated to occur in 0.5% to 2.3% of the neonatal populations’’. We can perform the first elimination: ‘‘Clinical seizures have been estimated to occur in 0.5% to 2.3% of the neonatal populations’’. The range of percentages presents possibilities of variance, making ‘’estimated’’ unnecessary.

Upon first glance, ‘’neonatal’’ seems like a essential word. However, upon inspection, ‘’neonatal population’’ is merely fancy way of saying ‘’newborns’’. So the sentence can be stripped down to ‘‘Clinical seizures occur in 0.5% to 2.3% of newborns’’.

Other notes including Verbs, Structure, and Writing Process are also available.