Catch Your Reader's Ear: The Simpler the Better for Scholarly Word Choice

“It appears the authors contrived a contextual audit of distinct, historical orators and their praxes in order to generate a conspectus of western rhetorical practices”

Yikes! I’m embarrassed to say this lengthy sentence can be found in my first grad school assignment.  I’m still not sure I know what it means, and I don’t think I knew then either. Luckily, I had a very patient professor that saw right through my attempt at sounding collegiate. They told me that good writing didn’t mean long-winded sentences full of multi-syllabic words I had looked up in a thesaurus. Again, Yikes.

Sure enough, I had written my paper in (what I thought) was a good example of scholarly voice. It had been awhile since I had been in school, and I was very self-conscious of my writing. I had no idea what my professor expected of me in my first paper, and I couldn’t help but compare myself to my peers. A number of them were in their second and third semesters of grad school, and some had already been published in academic journals! I thought I had to compensate for my inexperience by writing with complex jargon and ideas, void of any individual style.

I couldn’t have been more wrong! Scholarly writing is often viewed as dull and long-winded, but it doesn’t need to be. In fact, the best examples of scholarly writing are clear and direct, and they use concise language to inform and persuade.

However, like all forms of writing, developing a scholarly voice requires practice. Although my professor had explained where I went wrong with my first assignment, it took time and practice to hone the rules of good scholarly writing. For example, I had to learn to balance a formal tone with clarity and concision. In my example sentence, the tone is formal, but the words themselves are unnecessarily complex. To edit this sentence for clarity, I could replace the word “contrived” with “created” and “praxes” with “habits.” 

In fact, to edit this sentence for scholarly voice, I would rewrite it as follows:

“The authors created a list of distinct, historical orators and their habits to create a summary of western rhetorical practices.”

While I substituted some of the complex language for simpler ideas, the meaning of the sentence is still obscured. For example, while authors could in fact “create a list of orators,” the word “researched” better explains the authors’ specific actions. My second revision is as follows:

“The authors researched a list of distinct, historical orators and their habits to create a summary of western rhetorical practices.”

Finding your scholarly voice takes time and patience, and sometimes you have to accept help to discover your mistakes and opportunities for improvement. However, the Writing Center’s staff is here to support you through your journey. We get that scholarly writing is challenging and can be intimidating, because we’ve been in your shoes! Eventually, we all found our scholarly voice, and you will too.

Now it’s your turn! How would you revise my sentence, “It appears the authors contrived a contextual audit of distinct, historical orators and their praxes in order to generate a conspectus of western rhetorical practices” for clarity and concision? Or, if you have a personal example of a sentence you have edited for scholarly voice, please share with us in the comments! 

Tasha Sookochoff is a writing instructor in the Walden University Writing Center. Along with earning degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Stout and Depaul University, Tasha has written documentation for the U.S. House of Representatives that increases government transparency, blogged for DePaul University, copy-edited the Journal of Second Language Writing, tutored immigrants and refugees at literacy centers, and taught academic writing to college students.

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