Quick and dirty edits to elevate your writing

Does your writing contain more fluff than a flock of sheep? Then it’s time to fetch the clippers
stock image: Matthias Zomer/Pexels

No matter how little time you have available, there are always some quick edits you can make to your writing that will instantly make reading it more enjoyable, and after a while making these corrections will be so reflexive that you’ll just do them as you’re writing. The first time you ever edit your work, start a list of all the edits you make and keep a running tally. The most common ones are the ones you’ll need to watch out for in future work, so keep the list with you when you’re editing.

Quantification: There are still others that one can categorise as “vague”, where we would be better served to quantify the actual values instead (to give the reader the context of scale). Words like “relatively”, “big (or bigger)”, “small (or smaller)”, “large (or larger)”, etc. The reader encounters these words and wonders “larger than what?” or “relative to what?”. If they are left to piece together your meaning from context, they might draw the wrong conclusions. Or they might get annoyed. You definitely don’t want to annoy the reviewers. For example, if you had a sentence like “Mars is smaller than the Earth”, you wouldn’t be factually wrong, but the reader will also have a lot of questions. The first is – smaller in what sense? Are we talking about the radius or the mass? How much smaller is Mars? Just one piece of quantitative information would help the reader here – whether that be the actual mass of Mars or the Earth (or the actual radius, if you’re not talking about mass), or the relative difference. Giving a number and a unit is already of great help to the reader.

The Possessive Case: A common feature in most authors’ writing is the tendency to avoid the possessive case because it doesn’t sound fancy enough, particularly if the manuscript is also being written in the passive voice. What do I even mean by the possessive case? I mean that instead of constructing your sentence using “the Thingy of the Wotsit”, if the Wotsit can be considered as belonging to the Thingy, you can express this relationship by saying “the Wotsit’s Thingy”. A typical example in formal text might be to say something like “in the authors’ opinions” instead of “in the opinions of the authors”, or “the first trial’s results” instead of “the results of the first trial”. The advantage to using the possessive case is that it’s brief, and incorporating it into your text (when appropriate) is a trick that can help you meet page or word count limits. It’s not appropriate in every case – for example, “the War of the Worlds” can’t be sensibly rewritten as “the Worlds’ War” because the War doesn’t “belong” to the Worlds, the two Worlds are at War. Still, have a think as you read through your document and use this trick when it makes sense to do so.

Bracket-ception: Unless you’re literally writing computer code, there is no need to use nested brackets (if you have to use a set of braces (but within another set of braces (potentially infinitely)) then you’ve definitely got potential to restructure your sentences to make them more readable). If the first level of brackets is a long string of text, just make it a sentence in its own right. If the second level of brackets is an aside that could be braced with commas instead, do that! Nested brackets can make it really hard for the reader to keep track of what point you’re making, and can make the text look ugly on the page. Take out all but the most necessary ones.

Numbers: If you’ve got numbers in a list or sequence, they should be numeric (e.g., 12, 18, 41, 90). If you have one number in a sentence then it depends on the size of the number; single-digit numbers are usually spelled out, while larger numbers are still shown as numeric to make them easier to read.

Affect or Effect? You’d be amazed at how many people get these two mixed up. Not sure which one to use? Effect is a noun, so if you’re talking about an outcome, a result, or a consequence of something happening, you can safely talk about an effect. However, if you want to talk about something producing a change or creating an outcome, you want to use the verb to affect, meaning “to act on”. I have a simple trick to help you figure out which one to use.

Try inserting the word “outcome” wherever you’ve used affect/effect. For example, this sentence: “this experiment showed the most interesting effect” can also be written as “this experiment showed the most interesting outcome”, and this would at least make grammatical sense. However, if you had something like: “the choice of wavelength could affect the resolution”, it would be nonsensical if you swapped affect for outcome: “the choice of wavelength could outcome the resolution”, so you know you can’t use “effect” in this sentence.

Malapropisms and colloquialisms: A malapropism, or malaprop, is where the wrong word is shoved into a sentence in place of the word the speaker or author meant to use. Usually it will sound more-or-less like the intended word, but will have a very different meaning (this mistake is frequently used in comedy) which makes the sentences nonsensical as a result. Unfortunately, people who make these mistakes tend to do so with the brassy confidence of a used car salesperson, which can easily trick non-native English speakers into thinking they’re learning genuine English phrases, thus propagating the errors. The most common one you might encounter as an academic is “for all intensive purposes”, especially because it’s become so ubiquitous on TV in the US. This phrase is actually supposed to be “for all intents and purposes”, and it has the air of Victorian-era legalese, because that’s essentially where it came from. Another common one you may encounter is “on accident”, which should be “by accident”. If you can’t remember which one to use, then use “accidentally” instead. The third common phrase which has, to my great dismay, come into common use is “tad bit”, which is incorrect because “tad” means “little bit”. So when someone says “a tad bit”, they’re actually saying “a little bit bit”, which is silly! In any case, my advice would be to just delete any of these outright from your manuscript, because they’re colloquial, whether they’re correctly used or not!

Prepositions: There are couple of myths about English grammar that, when people try to follow them, result in bizarre, cumbersome, and lengthy constructions. The first example is the idea that you’re not allowed to end sentences with a preposition (“from”, “for”, “to”, “of”, “as”, “by”, “at”, etc.). Not only can you do this, but I encourage you to do so if it provides you with the neatest and clearest expression of what you want to say.

Singular “they”: Another doozy is the idea that you’re not allowed to use singular “they” as the pronoun where gender is unknown, because a handful of men in the 1800s (of course) declared themselves the default gender. Their modern-day equivalent (pedantic snowflakes on social media), only recently allowed for the use of “he or she” as opposed to just “he”. The idea that we might abandon a 200-year convention completely in favour of one that pre-dates it by at least 500 years is enough to send most of them into apoplexy. That’s right, folks. Singular “they” has been around since at least the 1300s, and it’s still as perfectly grammatically valid now as it was then.

Split infinitives: The third one that springs readily to mind is the myth that you’re not allowed to use split infinitives. Nonsense. Doing so can give a verb more impact, especially in places where you want to grab and hold the reader’s attention. But “What is a split infinitive?” I hear the confused native English speakers cry. Simply put, a full infinitive is the simple form of a verb that has “to” in front of it, like “to be”, “to ask”, or “to go”. To split it, you put an adverb between them to split them up, like “to simply be”, “to quickly ask”, or “to boldly go”. Feel free to use it if it means your phrasing is more succinct and clear.

Figure or fig? It can be confusing the first time you read a paper and it seems to use both “figure” and “fig” randomly when referring to figures in the text. The rule is that you should only spell out “figure” if it’s at the start of a sentence, or in a caption, and abbreviate to “fig.” if it isn’t. On the subject of abbreviations, whether you use a full stop or not in an abbreviation depends largely on whether you’re using American or British English. In British English, we only end abbreviations with a full stop if the final letter of the abbreviation is different from the full word, so for example, Mr doesn’t take a full stop (because “Mister” also ends in “r”) but Fig. does because figure ends in “e”. By this logic, Figs should not take a full stop because both figs and figures end in “s”, but just because British English is a bewildering mess of rules imposed at different times, you can legitimately use Figs. with a full stop! This is doubtless something we’ve recently borrowed form our American friends, who straightforwardly end every abbreviation with a full stop, no matter what. If you’re in any doubt, check the style guide of your chosen journal/institution to see which convention they prefer, but in the absence of any guidance, you’re less likely to run into trouble if you use the American rules.

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