Homework study tips expert grace has worked with students for many years as an academic advisor and college enrollment counselor. She currently works as a student success coordinator at a university in georgia, where she teaches courses to help students improve academic performance, enhance research skills, and expand information literacy. Read more students hear a lot about passive voice, but sometimes it takes them awhile to understand what makes a verb passive or active. To figure this out, students must concentrate on the subject and the verb of a sentence. Notice that the verbs in passive voice are preceded by was, which is a form of be. One way to recognize passive voice is to look for a form of be preceding the verb. The sentences above all make it very clear that a pickle is, was, or will be eaten but we cannot tell from these sentences who is actually eating.

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The phrases leave us wondering a little, and that is why teachers don’t like to see too much passive voice in your writing. In this ideology the argument used to sustain the subjugation of women has largely rested on premises about biological difference society has used the biological differences between men and women to legitimate hierarchical structures of social inequality. Society has traditionally confined women, because of their biological function as child bearers, to the domestic sphere and excluded them from the world 'out there'. As professors and researchers, you are responsible for writing research proposals.

Authoring academic books and scholarly journals, and designing and teaching courses. After editing thousands of pieces of academic writing, our editors have compiled five of the most common mistakes that academics make and offer suggestions on how to avoid them. An active sentence contains a subject that acts on a direct object: i bought the magazine. A passive sentence occurs when the object becomes the subject of the sentence and is the recipient, rather than the source, of the action: the magazine was bought by me.

The passive voice tends to spring up in academic writing when the doer of an action is indefinite or unknown, when a researcher feels uncomfortable using subjective pronouns like i or we. In these cases, the passive voice can be appropriate in academic writing, especially when rephrasing the sentence would introduce absurdity or unnecessarily complicated phrasing. However, sometimes the passive voice can frustrate a reader and, in extreme cases, represent an abdication of responsibility, as in the following example: mistakes were made. Who made the mistakes? sentences like these make readers wonder whether the author is trying to pull a fast one on them. We recommend looking over your academic writing and scrutinizing every instance of is, are, was, and were.

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Is there a way to make the sentence stronger by identifying the subject and making it the actor in the sentence? much academic writing contains sophisticated and complex thinking, as it should. However, the writing used to express this thinking does not have to be convoluted or unclear. Meandering clauses, dangling modifiers, and the like are so common in academic writing that one scholarly journal began holding a contest to choose the worst sentence of the year. Furthermore, academic writing that seems almost deliberately unclear makes our academic editors, as well as scholarly readers, wonder whether the author even understands what he or she means to say. It is possible to simplify and streamline your writing without dumbing it down or sacrificing nuance and complexity. We recommend reading your sentences aloud and then looking for ways to eliminate the wordiness of your sentences by breaking them up. Put yourself in your reader's shoes and think about whether your meaning comes across clearly.

Academic writing is also famous for using an abundance of esoteric complicated vocabulary that does little to convey the meaning clearly. While much academic writing is targeted to an insider audience readers who will know and understand the technical vocabulary of a given field , some writers go overboard, choosing the multisyllabic and rarely used synonym instead of a plain but effective word. Always remember that your goal is to communicate your ideas, not hide them in obscure terminology. Footnotes are a useful way to include information that has value but falls outside the scope of a paper's main focus.

We recommend asking yourself: are all your footnotes justified? if the information is important enough to warrant its own footnote, it may just be important enough to be included in the body of the paper. This one's more than a bad habit in academic writing mdash it could get you expelled or fired. Some plagiarism is intentional, but more often than not, disorganized research and careless writing are to blame.

Avoiding plagiarism is simple: any time you use someone else's words, give credit to the source. Authors work hard on their research and writing mdash give credit where credit is due. Tightening up your academic writing will help enhance your research paper and greatly increase your chances of getting published in a scholarly journal. Submit your next piece to one of our editing services for academics and receive an expert analysis asap! 1 the scholarly journal, philosophy and literature sponsored the bad writing contest from 1995 to 1998. This handout will explain the difference between active and passive voice in writing.

It gives examples of both, and shows how to turn a passive sentence into an active one. contributors: april toadvine, allen brizee, elizabeth angeli nearly every element of style that is accepted and encouraged in general academic writing is also considered good practice in scientific writing. The major difference between science writing and writing in other academic fields is the relative importance placed on certain stylistic elements.

This handout details the most critical aspects of scientific writing and provides some strategies for evaluating and improving your scientific prose. There are several different kinds of writing that fall under the umbrella of scientific writing. scientific writing can include: peer reviewed journal articles presenting primary research grant proposals you can’t do science without funding literature review articles summarizing and synthesizing research that has already been carried out as a student in the sciences, you are likely to spend some time writing lab reports, which often follow the format of peer reviewed articles and literature reviews. Regardless of the genre, though, all scientific writing has the same goal: to present data and/or ideas with a level of detail that allows a reader to evaluate the validity of the results and conclusions based only on the facts presented. The reader should be able to easily follow both the methods used to generate the data if it’s a primary research paper and the chain of logic used to draw conclusions from the data. Therefore, scientists must use precise, concrete language to evaluate and explain such theories, whether mathematical or conceptual. here are a few strategies for avoiding ambiguous, imprecise writing: often several words may convey similar meaning, but usually only one word is most appropriate in a given context.

here’s an example: word choice 1: population density is positively correlated with disease transmission rate word choice 2: population density is positively related to disease transmission rate in some contexts, correlated and related have similar meanings. But in scientific writing, correlated conveys a precise statistical relationship between two variables. In scientific writing, it is typically not enough to simply point out that two variables are related: the reader will expect you to explain the precise nature of the relationship note: when using correlation, you must explain somewhere in the paper how the correlation was estimated. If you mean correlated, then use the word correlated avoid substituting a less precise term when a more precise term is available. For example, the phrase writing of an investigative nature could refer to writing in the sciences, but might also refer to a police report. When presented with a choice, a more specific and less ambiguous phraseology is always preferable.

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This applies even when you must be repetitive to maintain precision: repetition is preferable to ambiguity. Although repetition of words or phrases often happens out of necessity, it can actually be beneficial by placing special emphasis on key concepts. Figurative language can make for interesting and engaging casual reading but is by definition imprecise. Writing experimental subjects were assaulted with a wall of sound does not convey the precise meaning of experimental subjects were presented with 20 second pulses of conspecific mating calls. It’s difficult for a reader to objectively evaluate your research if details are left to the imagination, so exclude similes and metaphors from your scientific writing. The reader should be able to easily follow your methodology, results, and logic without being distracted by irrelevant facts and descriptions.

ask yourself the following questions when you evaluate the level of detail in a paper: