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How to get better at academic writing quickly?
Working on my graduate degree and desperately need to get better at writing. I want to write and publish a lot but my grammar and general style is quite bad. The allure of AI is forever present but I resist it to maintain my own skill.
Edit: Thank you for all the kind replies.
Recently wrapped a PhD, so I feel your struggle. I'm a fine writer, but struggled to find the right balance for writing concisely, but with meaningful detailed.
I don't think I really mastered academic writing by the end, but there are a few things that improved my writing.
As someone else mentioned, feel free to DM me. I don't have time to review a whole paper, but I'd be happy to provide feedback on writing samples or provide advice if you feel like you're having a hard time explaining something.
Best of luck with grad school!
I agree with all of this advice, it's really great and covers a lot of important fundamentals. Piggybacking off here:
*The best way to get better at writing is to write. Most academic writing goes through multiple drafts - you will have personal drafts, coauthor drafts, supervisor drafts, reviewer drafts...few people, if anyone, write beautiful academic papers from scratch. So don't put the pressure on yourself to write perfectly from the start. This may be where LLMs are tempting, but I really recommend that you put in the legwork yourself. The LLM doesn't need practice, you do. So you need to go through all the phases of writing as you.
*If you can, write with someone else. Do you have an opportunity to do a lab paper or work as a coauthor? Can you do peer review on behalf of your supervisor? This allows you to see how others write in the editing stage, and to see different examples of what other writers do. A lot of peer review drafts are not good. I still beat myself up when writing and then roll my eyes sometimes when I see what makes it into peer review. Reminder: published writing has been reviewed and read and reviewed again many times. These are opportunities to improve and clarify your writing.
*Your thesis/dissertation will primarily be written by you and then picked apart by your supervisor, committee, and examiners. But after you graduate, you will rarely write alone and be responsible for everything. Find opportunities now to practice "real" publication quality writing. Find people to write with. Start a writing group with other grad students and come up with times to share things you've been working on. Have an "accountability buddy" to whom you report each week or two weeks - write a target number of words, or a section of a paper, or the intro to your thesis. Tell them if you didn't do it. Do the same for them. Work on your proposal if you're not that far - that can help serve as your thesis introduction. Practice summarizing the findings of literature you might cite, and use your own words. Intros and discussions synthesize and summarize existing information, whereas methods and results are didactic. There's nothing to interpret. Understand how these types of writing differ, and understand how to reference different source material.
*Advice from Stephen King that has been recommended to me repeatedly: in his book On Writing, he describes "swoopers" and "bashers". Bashers try to make every sentence perfect before moving on, agonizing over finding the perfect words or turn of phrase. This totally interrupts the flow of your writing, and causes you to stop instead of go. What you should try instead is swooping: when you are in "generate text" mode, just write. Write everything. Do you have a six part method? Summarize it, write all the steps down. Start with bullet points if you have to. Not sure how to frame your introduction? Start with a topic sentence outline. Leave placeholders for references you want to include later. Can't find any references to support your point? Do a lit search and see what is out there. Once you have text you can edit, then go back and agonize over the right word or structure. The point is that you can't edit something that isn't there, and it's a much better use of your time to just sit down and write shit than to self-flagellate and wonder what the LLM would say. Just write. Worry later. You will have plenty of opportunities for editing and feedback later :)
I am still not a great academic writer, but i've had enough practice that I can keep things moving. As much as possible, too, don't take feedback personally. There are some colossal assholes in academia that will try to make you feel bad about yourself. Ignore them completely. There is no need to be a flaming douchebag in review. If you edit someone else's work, think about offering constructive feedback, and give examples of what you would do differently. The author has the right to reject your feedback, but at least give them a good reason of what you would change. Writing is a lifelong skill to improve - hang in there, and keep at it! And if you ever are feeling bad, talk to your fellow students - I guarantee they feel very similarly.
u/ocean-hai, this is also great advice, so definitely check this out.
One thing that u/cheep_cheep's note on feedback reminded me of:
When you're providing feedback, it's essential (in my mind at least) to note everything that you LIKE in the paper/writing. Did they use a good example? Note it. Gave a clear explanation? Point it out. Praising and highlighting the good is potentially more important then identifying things you think could be improved. On one hand it makes you a positive person to work with and people will want to work with you more, but also identifying what is done well is helpful to both them so they know what to continue using and to YOU because you're making a note and spotting things to potentially immitate.
And I encourage you to ask your friends/peers to identify things that they like and think work well. In my experience, people are in the habit of trying to 'fix' someone else's writing and so only highlight things to change. So advocate for yourself by expressing the type of feedback you want, and build a culture with your peers that's supportive and encouraging.
Replying here to support the points made by u/cheep_cheep, especially regarding just simply writing and the difference between swoopers/bashers. Writing is a skill, and as with most skills, your primary mode of improvement is performing said skill with the mindset of taking the experience to reflect and improve. There's no substitute to bypass or speed up this process.
I'm outside the academic realm, but my job does require technical writing on occasion. The best writers are, unsurprisingly, the ones that write the most. Often times, my coworkers get caught up with trying to be "perfect" with their writing from the get go. This often leads to procrastination where they end up rushing a final draft last minute (or worse, forgetting to finish it until management is forced to take over the work). This leads to a negative feedback loop where because they deprived themselves the opportunity to write and receive feedback, they don't gain the experience to improve as much as others do.
I also strongly recommend against using LLMs for the same reason. The writing process is organizing your own thoughts, formulating rationale, and translating it into written word. Using LLMs will bypass parts of this for you. While LLMs can be helpful as a tool when properly used, they can cause you to develop fundamental weaknesses that will be harder to correct as you progress further into your career.
Think of cooking as an example. You can certainly improve your cooking using pre-seasoned meat if you examine your cooking skill purely on how well you cooked the meat itself. But you lose out on the feedback loop of seasoning the meat yourself and tasting the results of your efforts. Pre-seasoned meat is a perfectly fine invention, but somebody who wants to pursue a culinary career should avoid it while they are still learning.
You can ask an LLM to help you, with the explicit goal of teaching you to write better. Language is something LLMs are actually very good at. You can ask general questions about writing, or give it your writing and ask about critiques and suggestions with whatever level of specificity you want, like “is the structure and order okay” or “do I have enough examples” or “is this point sufficiently supporting my thesis”. Don’t have it write your sentences, but you can treat it like a student advisor or writing coach.
Of course, it does tempt overuse particularly when you get tired, the deadline draws near, or your overall thesis starts to feel weak and you want to plug holes in a sinking ship.
OP please, this shall be your last option, LLMs have somewhat a monotonic language structure, if you use them you are bound to copy their "template", which is not what you want as far as I understand.
That's not at all what is being suggested. Just ask it to review your writing the way a human would. Don't give new sentences, just state what needs improvement.
Explicitly ask it to not offer new versions or wordings. Ask it to explain flaws and perhaps provide links to resources that can help fix them (grammar sites, Purdue OWL, etc.). Ask it what makes other writers successful, what the common flaws are that can be quickly fixed, etc.
I think LLMs are likely very capable of stepping outside a single template. They have been trained on more written language than any single could ever be (many times over). It has long been trivial to ask for a certain style of writing.
But like updawg notes, I'm not really suggesting plastering over some armature of a template with your own writing. You can ask probing questions about language, writing, and logic.
Read more academic writing, or any non-fiction writing in general. Not just academic papers (in fact, they are often examples of very bad writing).
Also, those excercises were pretty useful to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tony1/Writing_exercise_box
And speaking of Wikipedia, editing it is a great way to practice.
You likely have access to the university writing center. It's there for this exactly.
The best advice for getting better at writing is to read a lot. Make anything and everything, good books, bad books, long works, short works, fiction, non-fiction, etc. You'll be surprised at how much you can absorb through osmosis if you just make it a habit to read as much as you can. Yes, even reading fiction can help with academic writing.
Think about what you're reading. We kind of have an intuitive sense on what makes "good writing." When you run across a piece of bad writing or writing that just doesn't click with you, ask yourself why you think so.
For academic writing specifically, from my teachers:
Academic writing is supposed to be concise. You're not expected to put together beautiful, flowery sentences that'll make Shakespeare weep. At the same time, you don't need 10 words when 5 will do. Save the Neal Stephenson impressions for other types of writing
There should also be clarity in academic writing. Since your goal is ultimately to convey information to your readers, your word choices and sentence structures should favor simplicity. You don't need to bust out the thesaurus and pepper your writing with $10 words. At the same time, if you're writing for professionals in a specific field, it is okay to use jargon and common terms in that field, especially if that word can save you a paragraph of explanations.
Understand the structure of what you're going to write. Every form of academic writing has some basic skeleton into which you fill your points. For example, psychology journal articles are expected to have intro, method, statistical analysis, discussion, conclusion as the basic outline (with like ten subparts in each). On the other hand, a law review article will have a different format of historical background, reading of the law, analysis and implications.
There is also a certain formal stiffness in academic writing. Avoid slang, cliches, colloquialisms, first person pronouns, second person pronouns.
You can post a snippet here or send a DM, I/we can take a look if you want. I didn't do university, but I do write as my job.
One thing that can help is learning how to write to extremely tight word counts. When I went from high school to university, this was the biggest change for me — going from essays with a (large) minimum word count to essays with a (tiny) maximum word count — and I had to unlearn some very bad habits.
If you intend to publish in academia, this skill will be particularly relevant. The publisher (especially at a top tier journal) will give you word or character counts that sometimes feel impossible to meet (especially when combined with assorted other requirements, like writing out the full names of organic compounds — ugh!).
A good way to practice is, any time you write something, challenge yourself to edit/rewrite it to 50% of your original word count. And after you've done that, do it again.
It will force you to expand your vocabulary substantially and learn how to hone in on your central thesis.