Developing a logical structure in YOUR English writing

Boring? No! This post outlines quick and easy-to-implement tricks for effective, structured, academic English including short videos, webinar recordings, graphics and phrase bank suggestions.

Effective writing is difficult in any language, but especially so in your second (or third). This blog is here to help! I’ve edited (and worked with companies who edit) hundreds of academic articles; we’ve encountered most of the mistakes that authors tend to make. We’ll cover these in this blog: If you know about the mistakes researchers tend to make in their English writing, you can avoid in your own work! Easy peasy! Save time and energy.

Clearly, the structure of sentences can influence your reader’s interpretations. Getting this right is tricky, however, and includes word placement, clause length, and paragraph structure. We’ll deal with each of these topics in turn and provide some insights into effective writing.

Simple and effective English = Plain English

Let’s get into the details …..

Word placement

Verbs are movement words. Action words. Words that do something. Readers expect verbs to closely follow the subject in a sentence, or they tend to get confused. Thus, a sentence with a subject placed earlier in the word order and separated far away from a verb tends to be harder to understand than one where the subject and verb are placed much closer together.

Let’s consider an example:

‘The viral infection over five years as measured in our data had declined greatly within the Japanese population’

‘The viral infection had declined greatly over five years within the Japanese population’

General rule: try to keep the subject and action towards the beginning of a sentence in order to aid understanding for readers.

Words at the beginning of a sentence do tend to carry more weight than those in the middle. In addition to subjects and actions, important words should also therefore be placed as early as possible.

‘The conversion from one kind of engine to another, however, was more frequent after initial testing’.

Compared to:

‘However, the conversion from one kind of engine to another was more frequent after initial testing’.

The second sentence is the easier to read.

Similarly, it is also important to place negative words towards the start of sentences, again, in order to get your message across. Consider one example:

‘We found evidence supporting the role of social programs in increasing wages was lacking’.

Or

‘We found no evidence supporting the role of social programs in increasing wages.’