18 posts tagged with "academic writing"

ReallyWrite now analyzes two more aspects of your writing: information flow and parallel structure. Both are key principles of clear academic writing and are now available in the ReallyWrite Editor (currently with a Beta label).

Information Flow: start from what the reader knows​

Have you ever read a sentence and felt lost, even though the words themselves were simple? Often the problem is that the sentence starts with something new instead of something that was already in the reader's mind.

ReallyWrite now has AI-powered suggestions!

How It Works​

When you click on an underlined or highlighted issue, you will now see an "AI Help" button at the bottom of the right panel. If you click the button, you will get an AI suggestion to improve that sentence.

We are using a customized large language model that tries to fix the issues that ReallyWrite identifies. This customization works a lot better than a generic LLM like ChatGPT, which often makes the text more complex than necessary or applies "academic style" (which can seriously harm the clarity of your writing).

If you can lay these myths to rest, you will convey your message more easily and effectively.

5. I need to use big words.​

In academic writing and scientific writing, you’ll probably already have quite a few big words to describe the context of your research. You can’t change these key words, but you can balance them out with shorter, simpler words. Choose short words whenever possible to lighten up the sentence.

Many of us struggle at the beginning stages of an article.

How should it be structured? What information belongs in this article? And how do I sort out all the information floating around in my head?

We can make this struggle easier by defining our take-home message early, preferably before we start writing.

What's a take-home message?​

We created ReallyWrite to empower you to write clearly. We want to help you learn to make your own decisions about your writing.

You may have noticed that the line-by-line feedback you receive in the ReallyWrite Editor is coupled to a learn page. The learn page explains why that issue matters and how you can go about fixing it.

ReallyWrite does not fix your text for you. Instead, it acts like a fresh, critical reader and helps you identify issues that are hard to see when you have been working on a text for a long time. It cannot tell you what to write, but it can automatically recognize the potential issues and show you how to fix them. Think of it as a teacher looking over your shoulder.

You won't fix ALL the issues that ReallyWrite points out. They are potential issues, so you need to think critically about each issue and decide whether it makes sense to rewrite your sentence to remove that issue.

Photo by Brooke Cagle

We see illogical structures more often than we think.

And the worst part?

We tend to blame ourselves when we struggle to parse a sentence, instead of noticing how the writer may have inadvertently made our job harder.

Question​

I recently had a question from a subscriber of the free email course. When they first read about given to new, they asked:

Speakers of Romance languages like French, Italian, or Spanish can face some specific difficulties when writing advanced English.

If you are in this situation, check out the following 3 tips to help you with the most common difficulties:

Writing is hard for everyone, that’s a given.

But writing can be hard in a different way for native speakers and non-native speakers of English.

Most teachers don't have time to explicitly teach writing as well as their content matter, but they still want students to write decently.

Because of course, who will be reading those papers?

If this sounds familiar to you, then why not use ReallyWrite in your classes? It's minimal effort, zero risk, and high reward.

To get you started:

5 ways you can use ReallyWrite to make your teaching life easier​

Those articles haven't always been so heavy​

Do you ever put down an article and wonder if it really had to be so hard to read? If it couldn't have been easier, lighter, more interesting? If it couldn´t have been written in a way that made it a pleasure, not a burden, to read?

Research articles don't have to be so heavy. They haven't always been this way.