How to craft engaging academic text

About the authors

Byron Creese, PhD, is a Senior Lecutrer in Neuroscience based in the UK.

Sarah Long is a copywriter and author based in Sweden.

This guide represents our personal views and not necessarily those of our employers.

Students: always read your assignment briefs and comply with the requirements of your institution.

What's in this guide:

• Introduction
• Original content
• Clear narrative
• Structure (phrases, clauses and word choice)
• Voice and tone 
• Top tips – writing exam answers
• Top tips – writing for the public
• Punctuation
• Tools and guides

Introduction

Whether you’re sitting an exam or submitting to a journal, crafting a successful piece of text boils down to three things:

1. Original content.
2. Clear narrative.
3. Coherent structure.

This is true no matter who you’re writing for, and if you can master them then your writing will be easy-to-read, more engaging and better understood.

Check this guide before you write so that you know what to bear in mind, and dip into it again when you’re editing text so that you can send it off with confidence.

Original content

Writing original content means answering one question: what am I trying to say?

The further you stray from that question, the worse your writing will be.

There are a number of issues that can lead your reader away from the points you’re trying to make – poor spelling, fatty sentences, dense paragraphs and bad fact-checking among them, all of which we’ll cover later but when you start to sketch a first draft, consider these points first:

• Have you included all the points you want to make?
• Have you drawn your own conclusions?
• Are you communicating your own ideas clearly?
• When you repeat ideas that are not your own, have you given your sources?
• Does your content have a clear narrative?

Clear narrative

Step one:

Plan your layout. Some good advice about laying out an argument comes from Aristotle. His Aristotelian triptych states: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.

Keep this is mind when you start to write and you’ll be able to develop a narrative for your text from the get-go.

Step two:

Break your writing up into chunks. Academic writing is filled with complex ideas so create paragraphs that are easy to digest and avoid long, run-on sentences. This will immediately reveal whether your narrative makes sense.

No one wants to read a wall of text, so whether you’re writing for journalists, examiners or the public, structure your text in a way that makes narrative sense and appears manageable to your reader.

Step three:

Polish each sentence. Once your paragraphs are arranged well and decluttered, it’s time to streamline your sentences, which is where things get a little more complicated… 

Structure

How to streamline sentences

To write great sentences, you first need to understand phrases, clauses and word choice

Clauses:

A clause is a unit that contains a subject and a verb, and for that reason can form a sentence on its own.

For example, “The study ran from April to May.” (Here the subject is study and the verb is ran.)

Phrases:

A phrase typically forms part of a clause, can contain nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs but cannot form a sentence on its own.

For example, “The study ran from April to May and was unsuccessful.” (Here the subject is study and the verb is ran and the adjective is unsuccessful.)

Word choice:

Word choice covers everything from vocabulary to editing. Astute word choice is the key to improving your writing.

Phrases and clauses

If your sentences are sounding long, clunky or confusing it’s probably due to a problem with your phrases, your clauses or your word choice, so let’s look at them more closely.

Begin by grouping ideas

Take a look at your phrases and clauses to identify groups of ideas. If your sentence is cluttered with ideas, your reader will struggle to organise them. Try breaking them into new sentences.

Look at the distance between your subject and verb

Don’t dangle a verb at the end of the sentence, far from its subject. “How high will costs from the project proposed for the northern region and the existing hospitals in the south and west be?” is ungainly.

Check for expressions that weigh down your sentences 

Don’t let tired phrases add unnecessary flab to your sentences. Ones to watch out for are: in addition to, due to the fact, in terms of, taking into account, etc.

Assess your subordinate clauses

Your academic writing will be successful if it conveys ideas and information coherently. A quick way to muddle that information and suck the life out of text is by subordinating your most interesting ideas. This happens when you have two or more clauses in your text and allow the less important (subordinate) clause to overshadow the main clause. 

For example: “Attention is an important psychological process, which is also essential for conscious awareness.”

Here, the important information is that attention is essential for conscious awareness but that is being subordinated by the first clause, which makes a generic (less important) point about attention.

Consider rewriting a sentence like this with the main clause first. “Attention is essential for conscious awareness and is an important psychological process.”

Or even better, chop the sentence completely to state simply “Attention is essential for conscious awareness.”

Word choice

Very long sentences often sabotage writing so your aim is to keep things concise without losing elegance in your flow of words – quite a task.

Here are some tips to help:

• Never use a long word when a short one will do.
• The job of every word you write is to convey meaning, remember “what am I trying to say?” So if a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
• Do not attempt to unnecessarily stuff your writing with scientific terms. If you can find an everyday equivalent for the idea you’re trying to convey, use that instead.
• The more text you put between the subject of your sentence and the main verb, the more clunky it will sound.
• It is distracting to a reader when writers are inconsistent with spelling and style. So, for example, if you’re spelling organised with an s, make sure it’s spelled with an s throughout your text.
• “Who” and “whom” are both needed but not interchangeable. The same goes for less/fewer, like/such as and imply/infer.
• “Compared to” is different from “compared with”. Use the first if you want to liken one thing to another, the second to contrast.
• Finally, pay attention to each word. Try not to zone out, speak in clichés or keep any word that is without meaning.

Voice and tone

Voice

Your writing should have a clear voice, the sound of you. This voice comes from two places: your word choice and your ideas.

Your word choice should follow the advice in our previous section but just remember – no waffle, no slang and don’t be afraid to sound like yourself.

When it comes to your ideas, they should include a display of your own critical thinking about the subject matter and your own conclusions about the question you’ve been asked. The temptation is often to write in blocks of ideas and statistics, but remember that your reader (whether a peer, an examiner or a journalist) must feel that your text was written by you and not generated by a machine.

Your voice can either be active or passive. An example of active voice is “we have included 1500 people in our trail.” An example of passive voice is “1500 people were included the trail.” You may choose to write in active or passive voice but in many cases it is best not mix both in one piece of writing (you can always check for style guidance specific to your piece). 

Tone

A consistent tone does not mean a monotonous tone. While your voice should stay consistent throughout any piece of writing, your writing will become more engaging if you know when to flex the tone of that voice. To show how this is done, let’s take an exam answer as an example.

These two paragraphs are on the same topic. They display the writer’s voice, which is clear and authoritative, and yet the tone of the two paragraphs differs slightly.

The first paragraph gently introduces the reader to the subject and uses emotional reasoning to engage them, whereas the second paragraph changes tone slightly, focusing less on emotional adjectives (like urgent and inefficient) and more on formal scientific terminology. You should be able to select the right tone at the right time to keep your reader interested in what you are saying.

Engaging tone - example

There exists an urgent need to improve the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in order to optimize interventions in preclinical phases, and potentially improve success rates in trials of disease-modifying therapies. Access to biomarkers for preclinical disease detection is improving, but screening of cognitively asymptomatic populations remains inefficient and costly.

Formal tone - example

Later-life neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) are reliably associated with greater risk of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia . This evidence motivated the development of the mild behavioral impairment (MBI) diagnostic framework, which operationalizes and standardizes the assessment of NPS in older adults, to improve risk determination of all-cause dementia.

Top tips – writing exam answers

There are three main points to consider when answering exam questions:

1. Make a strong argument.
2. Get to the point.
3. Write for a human.

In an exam you need to work with precision and speed so formulate your argument first, and make it convincing.

Next, hone and craft your text ensuring that you get to the point as quickly as possible within the framework of your narrative.

Finally, remember that your examiners are human beings, they appreciate clear and cohesive text that has a defined structure. Before you submit the text, proof read it and check the spelling.

Top tips – writing for the public

Whether you’re writing presentations, speeches or articles, text presented to the public must be accessible.

What is accessible text?

Members of the public have a range of reading competencies, so when you write for such a wide range of people it needs to be easy to read and understand. Globally, neurodiverse individuals make up 15-20% of the population. This includes those with dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, specific language impairment and those on the autism spectrum. There are a range of things you can do to make your writing more accessible for these individuals.

• Do not use all caps.
• Try to write in sans serif fonts.
• Do not include content that flashes at particular rates and patterns.
• Pages should have clear headings and follow a maeaningful sequence.
• Explain all the abbreviations you use.
• Do not use jargon, in-jokes or slang.
• Focus on your narrative, make it clear and coherent.

Punctuation

Full stops: many of us were taught to use two spaces after a full stop but for published text, the convention is now to use only one.

Commas: using the Oxford comma can add form, clarity, and improve pacing.

Remember to use a comma to separate coordinate adjectives. Coordinate adjectives modify the same noun independently, such as “he was a loud, mean, busy man.” Do not use commas to separate non-coordinate adjectives, such as “she wore a bright red summer dress.” 

Finally, remember to use a comma after introductory phrases and clauses (such as the one at the beginning of this sentence).

Dashes and hyphens: hyphens join, dashes separate.

An em dash looks like this —    

An en dash looks like this – 

A hyphen looks like this -  

Hyphens are used to form compound adjectives such as world-famous scientist, and in words whose official spelling contains a hyphen, such as X-ray.

Use dashes to separate out a phrase within a sentence – perhaps to break up the text, or in date ranges such as 1990-1995. You can choose to use an em or an en dash but be aware that em dashes are mainly used in US English, not UK English.

Tools and guides

There are a wide range of style guides that can help with your spelling and terminology. Choose one guide and stick to it to keep your text consistent.

The Writer Style Guide

The Guardian Style Guide

The Yale Medical Style Guide

Readability checkers might also be helpful before submitting work. You can use free versions, which are just as good as expensive readability software.

Grammarly

Simple Flesch-Kincaid calculator