TEA BREAK

ACEING ACADEMIA #11: Avoid squeezing too many ideas in a paragraph

This is not a trick question: how many ideas should be in each paragraph of an academic document?

The answer: just one idea per paragraph please.

This pulls together ACEing Academia 3 and 7: you need to avoid unstructured paragraphs AND creating a wall of text. However, the reason that walls of text tend to proliferate in academic writing is often because too many ideas are crammed into one space.

It’s a bit like throwing all of your holiday clothes into an overstuffed suitcase. Sure, you have everything you need for your jaunt to Barcelona, but can you actually find the outfit you want when you need to? Packing cubes make it manageable.

Clear writing is about knocking down barriers between you and your reader. By keeping each paragraph to one main idea, it means they can easily follow your train of thought and the argument or narrative you are creating. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations are kept to a minimum.

1️⃣ CLEAR TOPIC SENTENCE: As discussed in ACEing Academia 3, the topic sentence signals to your reader what the following sentences will be about. However, it can also remind you what you should be focusing on. If you start to stray off track, it’s probably an indication that you should save that information for another paragraph.

2️⃣ REVERSE OUTLINE: This is a great tool to help you see if you’re trying to squeeze too many into one suitcase, er, paragraph. Summarise the paragraph in five words or less. If you use “and”, there are probably too many ideas involved. Using this technique on a paper or proposal is a simple way to see if you’ve have built up a logical flow through your document, or if there are gaps still to be filled.

3️⃣ GET FEEDBACK: I’m not sure how many times I’ve recommended getting feedback so far, but it’s a good way to solve a lot of writing problems. However, there are a few secrets if you want feedback that will have impact.

First, you must encourage your readers to be as honest as possible: they have to speak up if they have any questions or if anything is unclear. In #academia in particular, people are often afraid of appearing like they don’t understand something. But when it comes to providing feedback, readers have to indicate where they got confused. That’s the only way you can make it better.

Second, ask for feedback about specific aspects of your writing, based on what you are aware of. If you know that you tend to write walls of text, ask your readers to flag up if they have trouble following the structure of your paragraphs. This can be used for any aspect of writing, e.g.: “Please let me know what you think about the argument I’ve made, and if I forgot to define any acronyms.” This helps you catch the most likely problems.

See the other posts in the ACEing Academia series:

♠  Content
♦  Clarity
♣  Structure
♥  Style