I Hated Academic Writing Until I Discovered These Simple Hacks

blah I hate academic writing it makes me feel sick I was never super strong at academic writing during my PhD in my posttop but I learned these tricks just to make it easier on myself but stay around to the end of this video because AI makes it super easy to make your academic writing perfect M chef's kiss so the first tip is be concise chop out the words that you don't need this was one of my biggest issues because when I'm writing something off the top of my head I put in loads and loads of

words that shouldn't be in there one of the most important ones I always included that should never be in there is that that that that that that I've put that everywhere but when it came to editing I made sure that my writing was concise so for example here we've got this one the report provided an explanation for these unusual results and we can see we can chop out and make it smaller and Tighter by saying the report explained these unusual results so we went from this long one to this shorter one so all you have

to do really is when you're going through the first draft or any draft of anything you write you just have to make sure that you are using as few words as possible but still get across the idea that is why academic language in writing is so so dense and so horrible to read because the amount of words per sentence that you need to pay attention to is huge crammed in mega impact that is academic writing anyway here's another one due to the fact that this experiment was conducted improperly the results were invalid you can see

we go from all of this just to this because because the experiment was conducted improperly the results were invalid so look at every sentence every paragraph make sure you're being as concise as possible and the last one is there are many different types of bacteria that were found in the sample and each of these types exhibits a unique characteristics H did that make sense and each of these types exhibits unique characteristics oh even that's hard to say and then we go concise the sample contain various types of bacteria each with unique characteristics oo so much

better so much more concise love it tip one the second biggest tip that you should know about is use the active voice the active voice comes down to essentially the subject and the verb and the order in which these are sort of like interplaying in your writing far too often we say that something was acted upon in a certain way that is the passive voice when instead we want to say the subject does this to something that is much more powerful and much more common in academic language don't understand check this out rather than saying

a study was conducted by the archaeologist we want to say directly that the archaeologist did a study that is active not passive another one the experiment was conducted by the researchers so here we have the researchers and it's much better to say the researchers did something so here we say the researchers conducted the experiment and down here the data was collected over a period of 6 months we should say who is doing the collecting and what they did so here we say the researchers collected data over the period of 6 months so whenever you're unsure

just go to chat GPT and say am I writing this in the active voice if not could you correct it and that is one way of getting around that confusing passive and active voice thing tip three is use formal language now it's really annoying because these days especially with social media especially the fact that everything's online it is just so informal the world is informal it even sort of like stems from do you remember you probably too young but you remember the text when you're like I'll be there late uh with an eight it kind

of like you know that's the extreme of it academic writing is the other end where everything is formal precise lovely so check out this so it says avoid contradictions idioms and colloquial expressions and academic writing is formal and I mean really really formal so instead of writing it it's better to write it is instead of writing could have it could have is better and use formal language to maintain professionalism in your writing so for example instead of saying the experiment was a piece of cake say the experiment straightforward and efficient o nice that's much better

but you're probably asking yourself where do you get all these ideas you can use chat GPT but I like to check out other stuff and this is the thesis Whisperers Blackline Masters a Blackline Master is an A4 sheet of exercises or information designed for inuse classrooms and you can see down here we've got all of these that we can use so if we're looking for powerful paragraphs we can you know take um essentially a hint from all of this and then there's other ones conjugative verb so um we can put the adverb conjur so we

sequenced the coconut G and could not identify the elements incidentally we changed our approach so there's loads of ways to change your language make sure that it's formal um and verb cheat sheet down here is pretty good the one thing I like about this is that if you want to say something is awesome you can also say proves distinguishes assesses so essentially it's like pick and choose which one you like your pick and mix of words pick pick pick pick pick just so that you can uh make your writing as awesome as possible and we

want to avoid informal language so if you head over here and you think wow that was awesome or this sucks instead of saying this work is uh poor or this sucks you can say you know this um uh generalizes it tells it justifies um it chooses certain things it makes you solve certain things you know this is the way we can use it if you feel neutral about something you can say restate classify whatever it is so overall this is how you um make your work better is by using more formal language you can start

informally and I do recommend to a lot of people to brain dump whenever they're just kind of starting to write just let the vomit out onto the page and these bits are what actually makes your writing academic go back through it I can't tell you how many times a peer-reviewed paper or a thesis chapter or a dissertation chapter was poured over time and time again to make it more academic it's not easy it's not quick but this is the process of making your language academic let it spill out and then do these we got one

more little tip for you wait for this one the last tip that I've got for you is avoid repetition when I'm writing in an academic way I start using like therefore nonetheless furthermore and it's just really really boring so here you can see for transition words instead of repeating also in addition furthermore moreover you can just sort of like make your writing more Dynamic and interesting by changing these up once again you can ask chat GPT to rework a sentence if you are repeating yourself or you can go to that thing that I just talked

about which is here where we've got verbs um and other things that we can use okay Blackline Masters we want to go down to verb cheat sheet um we've also got you know like uh what else have we got yeah there we are this is all the stuff it's in the useful words sort of document where we've got comparison also similarly in a similar way comparing um and also similar one something another and then last besides also nonetheless here it is all of this if you were to write a paper and just sort of like

go through all of this and just put them in the peer reviewers your supervisor whoever is reading it will love it so if you find yourself using something again or other or likewise or furthermore over and over again like I did because I didn't have that kind of mental capacity to really hold all of this in my head um just use a cheat sheet like this which is perfect but another thing I like to do is head over to your favorite large language model and just give it simple prompts let's have a look so if

you're writing something the one thing I like to do is take those four things and just say do these things to that paragraph so I can say first of all here is a paragraph that I am working on for my thesis did I spell everything right I'm a bloody genius I did and then you put the paragraph in whatever it is and then we just put in what we had so make it more concise make sure it's active voice avoid repeti ition oh look oh God I was being so cocky as well repetition avoid repetition

and um make it more academic okay good and then what you'll get is chat GPT really working on those four things so in the Contemporary World technology pervades all aspects of Life facilitating as so you can see already it's really really so much more academic I'm not saying it's perfect for the people that are going to be in the comments and be like Oh Andy not the way you should do it no it's not the way you should do it because there's more stuff that needs to go in this but going from something like this

to this is so much easier with chat GPT and then we can go in and start removing words we can make it more concise but importantly going through those last little changes which make it your work and not the ai's work so that is how you make your academic writing better if you like this video go check out this one where I talk about using paper palal AI to make your academic writing unbelievable go check it out for