All writing, including academic writing, is a skill that improves with practice. The following simple exercises are designed to improve some basic elements though, of course, developing one's unique voice takes time. People who write for a living, such as journalists, become adept at making their writing quickly clear for a first time reader. Academic writing should, similarly, aim at not needing decoding but should wear its meaning on its sleeve.
Carrying out routine exercises can help. The following exercises make use of a ready supply of newspaper articles and editorials, my own academic papers and Alan the Alien episodes. Hence they can be repeated. For anyone keen to improve their self-conscious mastery of their own style, I suggest doing one version of each exercise every day for two weeks. The skill in summarising or in editing text down is not merely being able to do it at all. It is being able to do it effortlessly.
While these exercises can be carried out alone - marking one's own homework, as it were - most would be better done with the assistance of someone else to offer a second perspective and to check that one's use of English has not gone awry. In general, while academic writing is more formal than natural speech, it ought to be possible to read it aloud and for it to sound natural. If it does not then the chances are that something has gone wrong, rather than that it is a correct, though overly formal, use of academic English.
1: Prose reduction
One often needs to reduce a piece of academic writing by some fraction to fit a word limit. But the ability to reduce a piece of writing also encourages a clearer sense of how the writing - as writing - works. It enables a self-conscious understanding of the mechanisms in play to which normally, when we read for information, we are oblivious. Since newspaper prose is usually already heavily edited and terse, I suggest using a specific series of articles from the Guardian which are less edited and more relaxed.
Exercise: select an article from the Guardian's Long Read series. Cut and paste the first 5 paragraphs into a Word document. Now by deletion and minor editing (such as adding back in necessary words), reduce the word count by 10%. Read it through and check that it still makes sense and sounds right. Now reduce it by a further 10% and again read it through. Repeat the process with different articles until it becomes easy.
2: Prose summary
Often when we read we passively follow the argument or narrative thread. Summarising forces greater attention to what is essential in a text. It is a skill that improves with practice. Summarising one's own work is vital for writing abstracts, introductions and conclusions. Summarising other people's work helps analyse arguments. One's readers should never feel that the text is getting away from the author. We should look as though we know what we are doing. Summarising is one way to check that what we have written reflects what we wanted to write.
Exercise: select an article from the Guardian's Long Read series. Read the first 5 paragraphs and jot down, as bullet points, the most important claims. They may not be equally divided between the paragraphs. Now assemble a single paragraph, in full sentences, which thus summarises the 5 original paragraphs. Read it aloud to check that it sounds natural.
This exercise is better done with a colleague and both summaries compared after the fact. Compare what you took to be essential and think about the disagreements.
3: Abstract / introduction writing
In the sciences, the abstracts at the start of papers are often highly regimented. In the humanities they are usually single summarising paragraphs. Introductions are typically free-flowing prose in all disciplines. This exercise is designed to improve one's skill not just in summarising but also in highlighting how an argument will be presented. I suggest the use of newspaper editorials since these are generally arguments in support of the newspaper's view of some matter.
Exercise: select an editorial column from the Guardian. Read it through and identify its main conclusion. Note how the conclusion is arrived at. By what argument or arguments is it reached and are there any contrary arguments considered and rejected? Now write a short paragraph as an abstract. Try to balance giving any necessary background with a clear indication of the conclusion to be reached and any key steps that will follow. Read it out aloud and check that it sounds natural and right.
4: Subheadings
Subheadings help to highlight the implicit structure of an argument or a narrative in a piece of writing. The best way to practise using subheadings with your actual academic writing but the second somewhat artificial exercise may help.
Exercise: look at a piece of your own academic writing and in particular at any abstract, introduction and conclusion. Cut and paste into a fresh document just these sections and any subheadings. Do the abstract, introduction and conclusion all clearly relate to the same basic argument or narrative? And do the subheadings relate to the implicit advertisement of the structure in the abstract and/or introduction? If not, how could they be unified?
Exercise: take an abstract that you wrote in exercise 3. Ignore the actual editorial column on which it was based and look instead at the structure that the abstract promised. Now invent some subheadings that would fit the abstract. (Editorials are too short to need subheadings so this is a virtual exercise.) Does the selection of subheadings suggest revisions for the abstract?
5: Signposting
Signposting is writing about writing in order to tell the reader what will happen or to summarise what has happened. Signposting often relates to subheadings. Having the right amount of signposting is a delicate balance. Too little and the reader may not know what is going on. Too much and the prose slows to a halt. Different authors in different disciplines naturally use different amounts of signposting. Since I explicitly use it, the exercise suggests looking at my own writing. This is not because I am a great stylist but you will at least know that there is signposting to be found.
Exercise: look at one of my papers found here. Do not get bogged down in what the paper is about but skim it quickly and pick out all the signposting (sentences which tell the reader what is happening rather than concerning the philosophical subject matter of the paper). Think critically what you think of this level of signposting. Is it too much or too little? Consider whether it is redundant in the context and how much it slows down the prose. How does it relate to the choice of subheadings?
When repeating this exercise, look elsewhere for academic papers. It is worth comparing scientific and humanities-based papers. In general, because there is a much more agreed structure to science papers, they need less signposting (because it is more obvious what is going on).
6: Commas!
We all liked looking at commas! In the session, I suggested that I found it useful to think of commas as having two key uses. i) They mark out items in lists. ii) They articulate sub-clauses. (There are other uses. I didn't mention the famous Oxford comma.) The second use suggests that one should expect such commas to occur in pairs in sentences, marking out the start and finish of a sub-clause. However, the start or finish of a sentence can serve as the second comma. Also note that authors often omit one such comma by accident, perhaps because it is clear in the context where it should be. (I do this, sadly.)
The point of these two exercises is that if one has self-conscious mastery of commas, it is hard for a sentence to get away from one. Whether actually ungrammatical or whether just clumsy, academics too often write awful sentences as though they have not thought them through. But if you look after the commas, the sentences and the paragraphs might just about take care of themselves.
Exercise: look at the article used in the prose reduction exercise again and read it aloud, voicing all the commas. Can you spot the use of commas to mark out sub-clauses.? If so, re-read such sentences omitting the sub-clauses. What is the shortest full sentence left once sub-clauses have been omitted?
The above exercise is complicated by the fact that other punctuation exists! The script writers for Alan the Alien's Log, however, being simple minded folk, tend to use only commas, colons and dashes.
Exercise: look at an episode of Alan the Alien's Log to find one with a long sentence with commas. Extract the essential sentence once the sub-clause or sub-clauses has been omitted.
For example, 9.5 contains this brute of a pair of (ghoulish, sorry!) sentences.
But, humanely sensitive to potential suffering and unhappiness as ever, Alan has a hunch that, as long as they meet their fate on a noteworthy birthday and on some sort of (wipe clean) roundabout or carousel, they will be happy to be shot in the head at point blank range. TW has even borrowed an antique brass Gatling gun from the museum to make things yet more special, particularly for weddings and gender reveal parties.
This can be reduced as follows:
But, humanely sensitive to potential suffering and unhappiness as ever, Alan has a hunch that, as long as they meet their fate on a noteworthy birthday and on some sort of (wipe clean) roundabout or carousel, they will be happy to be shot in the head at point blank range. TW has even borrowed an antique brass Gatling gun from the museum to make things yet more special, particularly for weddings and gender reveal parties.
So the first sentence has this as its essential structure: Alan has a hunch that they will be happy to be shot in the head at point blank range.