• Hercules was as strong as an ox.
• I have to give an arm and a leg to find a parking spot during the holiday season.
• Each and every one
• It was as pretty as a picture.

• "I am writing to you to ask you to. . . ."
• "This paper is going to talk about how. . . ."

Make your thesis obvious throughout

An essay, article, or report should have one main topic (the "thesis") that is clearly evident in the introduction and conclusion. Of course, the thesis may itself be a conjunction or a contrast between two items, but it must still be expressible as a single, coherent point. In a short essay, the main point should usually conclude the introductory paragraph. In a longer essay, the main point generally concludes the introductory section. The reader should never be in any doubt about what your thesis is; whenever you think it might not be absolutely obvious, remind the reader again.

When in doubt, use the recipe: introduce, expand/justify, conclude

Paragraphs, subsections, sections, chapters, and books all use the same structure: first make the topic clear, then expand upon it, and finally sum up, tying everything back to the topic. At each level, you need to tell the reader what you will be trying to say (in this paragraph, section, etc.), then you need to cover all the relevant material, clearly relating it to your stated point, and finally you need to tie the subtopics together so that they do indeed add up to establish the point that you promised.

Stay on topic

Everything in your document should be related clearly to your main thesis. You can write other papers later for anything else you might want to say. The reason your reader is reading this particular paper of yours is that he or she wants to know about your main topic, not simply about everything you might want to say (unless for some narcissistic reason "everything you might want to say" is your clearly stated main topic).

Conversely, there is no need to bring up items simply because they relate to your main topic, if you do not have anything to say about them. If you do bring something up, say something important about it!

Staying on topic does not mean being one sided

To avoid being misleading, you will often need to acknowledge some weaknesses in your argument or discuss some merits of an opposing argument. It is quite appropriate to discuss such opposing views when they are relevant, i.e., when they relate directly to the main topic of your paper. For instance, if you are reviewing a paper and arguing that it was not written well overall, it is usually a good idea to point out the few things that were done well, e.g. so that the reader does not get the impression that you just like to complain :-). Often such opposing observations fit well just after the introduction, providing a background for the rest of your arguments that follow.

Whenever you do include such material, i.e. things that go in the direction opposite to your main thesis, be careful to put it into only a few well-defined places, reorganizing your argument to achieve that when necessary. Jumping back and forth will confuse the reader unnecessarily. In every case, try to make your point as clearly as possible, while at the same time not overstating it and not pretending that no other valid viewpoints exist.

Transitions are difficult but very important

Each sentence in your document should follow smoothly from the preceding sentence, and each paragraph should follow smoothly from the preceding paragraph. The world is arguably an unstructured jumble of ideas, but anything that you expect the reader to read from start to finish needs to be a linear progression along one single path. Transition words and phrases are what make it possible for a reader to follow you easily as you explore the various ideas in your paper. Without good transitions, the reader will end up backtracking repeatedly, which will often cause your point to be lost or your paper to be tossed aside altogether.

One clue that your writing needs better transitions is if you find that you can cut and paste paragraphs from one section to another without doing substantial rewriting of how the paragraph begins and ends. If making such rearrangements is easy, then you have not been linking your paragraphs into a coherent narrative that reads well from start to finish.

In practice, making smooth transitions is very difficult. Learning to do it takes a lot of practice at first, and actually making the transitions smooth takes a lot of effort every time you write or revise something. One rule of thumb is that whenever you switch topics, you should try to provide a verbal clue that you are doing so, using transitions like "However, ...", "As a result, ...", "For comparison, ", etc.

If you notice that you have to add these words between most of your sentences, not just the paragraphs, then you are bouncing around too much. In that case you need to reorganize your document to group related thoughts together, switching topics only when necessary. Once the organization is good, all you can do is read and reread what you write, rewording it until each new item follows easily from those before it.

Write what you mean, mean what you write

Speakers use many informal, colloquial phrases in casual conversation, usually intending to convey meanings other than what the words literally indicate. For instance, we often speak informally of "going the extra mile", "at the end of the day", "hard facts", things being "crystal clear" or "pretty" convincing, someone "sticking to" a topic, readers being "turned off", something "really" being the case, etc. Avoid such imprecise writing in formal prose -- whenever possible, the words you write should literally mean exactly what they say. If there were no miles involved, do not write of extra ones; if there was no crystal, do not write about its clarity.

Among other benefits, avoiding such informal language will ensure that your meaning is obvious even to those who have not learned the currently popular idioms, such as those for whom English is a second language and those who might read your writing years from now or in another part of the world. Formal writing should be clear to as many people as possible, and its meaning should not depend on the whims of your local dialect of English. It is a permanent and public record of your ideas, and should mean precisely what you have written.

Avoid redundancy

Unfortunately, specifying minimum page requirements encourages redundancy, but please try to avoid that temptation. When two words will do, there is no need to use twenty. Whenever you finish a sentence or paragraph, read over it to see if any words or sentences can be eliminated -- often your point will get much stronger when you do so. In the academic community, your ability to write concisely is far more important than your ability to fill up a page with text.

Academic courses specify page minimums to ensure that you write an essay of the appropriate depth, not to test whether you can say the same thing a dozen different ways just to fill up space. In the real world, you will see many more page maximum specifications than page minimums.

Avoid imperative voice

Use imperative voice sparingly in an academic paper, because it comes across as rude (as do many of the sentences in what you are reading right now!). E.g. do not say "Recall that ...". Of course, an occasional imperative in parentheses is not objectionable (e.g. "(see Walker 1996 for more details).").

Document organization

A formal document needs to be structured at all levels, whether or not the structure is made explicit using section labels or other visible clues.

Overall structure

The standard format for an effective essay or article is to: (1) present a coherent thesis in the introduction, (2) try your hardest to convince the reader of your thesis in the body of the paper, and (3) restate the thesis in the conclusion so that the reader remains quite sure what your thesis is, and so that the reader can decide whether he or she was convinced.

Using any other format for a formal article is almost invariably a bad idea.

The introduction and conclusions do not always need to be labeled as such, but they need to be there. 

Each paragraph is one relevant sub-topic

Each paragraph in a document should have one topic that is clearly evident early in the paragraph. Every paragraph should have a clear relationship to the main topic of your document; if not, either the paragraph should be eliminated, or the main topic should be revised.

Use complete sentences

Except in extraordinary circumstances, sentences in the main text must be complete, i.e., they must have a subject and a verb, so that they express an entire thought, not just a fragment or the beginning of a thought. Note that most "-ing" words are not verbs. "The light turning green" is just a fragment, i.e., a start to a sentence or a part of one. To be a sentence that you could use on its own followed by a period, it would have to be "The light turned green", which has both a subject and a verb.

Put appropriate punctuation between sentences

Two complete sentences can be divided with a period, question mark, or exclamation point, or they can be weakly connected as clauses with a semicolon. However, they can never be connected with a comma in formal writing! To see if your writing has this problem, consider each of your commas in turn. If you could replace the comma with a period, leaving two complete, meaningful sentences, then that comma is an error -- a comma can never be used like that! Instead, replace the comma with a semicolon, in case you have two sentences that need to be linked in some generic way, or make the linkage explicit with a conjunction, or simply use a period, to leave two complete and independent sentences.

Everything important goes in your introduction and conclusion

Everyone who looks at your paper will at least skim the introduction and conclusion, and those who read it in depth will remember those two sections the best. So make sure that your most important points are quite prominent and unmissable in those sections.

Say it, never just say that you will say it

In the introduction, conclusion, and abstract (if any), do not merely describe what you are going to say or have said; actually say it! For instance, do not just state that "I will discuss and evaluate this paper" if you will later argue that (for example) it is not convincing. Instead state that the paper is unconvincing, and (in brief) why you believe that to be the case. Then you can elaborate on that point in subsequent paragraphs.

Word-level issues

Try hard to avoid ambiguous references

Conversation is replete with ambiguous words like "this", "these", "his", "it", "they", etc. These words have no meaning in themselves, but in conversation the meaning is usually clear from the context. In written text, however, the intended meaning is quite often not evident to the reader, because there are e.g. many possible interpretations of "it" and "this".

It is a good idea to read over anything you write, searching for this sort of word. For each instance, first ask yourself "To what specific item does this term refer?". For such a reference to make sense, the object, person, or concept must have been explicitly mentioned just prior to your reference. Often you will find that "it" or "they" refers to something vague that was not even discussed explicitly in your paper, in which case you should reword your text entirely.

Even if the item to which you refer is explicitly mentioned in your paper, ask yourself whether there is any chance that the reader might not know to which of several items you might be referring. E.g. for the word "he", were there two or three people being discussed? If so then state the actual name of each; "he" would be ambiguous.

Often an ambiguous "this" or "these" can be disambiguated by adding a noun that specifies precisely the type of object or concept to which you are referring. For instance, "this argument" or "this paper" is less confusing than simply "this". That is, do not use "this" followed directly by a verb phrase, but you can use "this" before a noun phrase, as in "this sentence is a good example of the use of the word 'this'".

Watch out for homonyms

Spell checkers are wonderful, but they are absolutely useless for detecting misused homonyms or near-homonyms, i.e., actual words whose meaning is confused with other actual words. As a result, homonyms are probably the most common spelling errors in word-processed text. Even if you are lazy and let the spell checker fix all of your other words, make certain that you know the differences between words like:

it's, its their, there, they're whether, weather to, too, two site, cite, sight waste, waist whole, hole fare, fair great, grate

affect, effect discrete, discreet forth, fourth past, passed roll, role lead, led lie, lye throughout, through out seem, seam

new, knew illicit, elicit complement, compliment extent, extend obtain, attain pair, pare personal, personnel suit, suite principal, principle bear, bare

If you do not know the difference, you must simply avoid using any of these words. Yet because the spell checker takes care of all the other words you may misspell, learning to use these few words correctly is surely not much of a burden, and is crucial for convincing your readers that you are competent and trustworthy.

.

Avoid capitalization

When in doubt, use lower case. Capitalization is appropriate only for specific, named, individual items or people. For example, capitalize school subjects only when you are referring to a specific course at a specific school: math is a general subject, but Math 301 is a particular course.

American vs. British English

I myself am American by birth, despite lecturing in a British university, and I use American spellings by default (e.g. "organization", not "organisation"). Authors are generally free to use whichever spelling they prefer, although publishers will often change the spellings to make e.g. all the papers in a certain edited volume use the same conventions. Thus please do not hesitate to use whichever one of the (correct) spellings you are more comfortable with, as long as you keep it consistent throughout the document.

Additional guidelines specific to academic writing

Formatting and grammar rules

When in doubt about grammar or page format, researchers in psychology and computer science generally follow the APA style guide. Researchers in English typically follow MLA format.

Use last names

Never refer to the authors by their first names, as if they were your friends. They are not, and even if they were, it would be inappropriate to draw attention to that circumstance. Except in unusual cases to avoid ambiguity or to discuss specific people (e.g. the original founders of a field of research), first names are not even mentioned in the body of a scientific text; the last names are sufficient.

Author names are keys -- spell them properly

In academic writing, an author's last name is like the key in a database lookup -- if the name is misspelled (e.g. "Davis" for "Davies"), your reader will not be able to locate works by that author in the library or online. Moreover, it is extraordinarily impolite to misspell someone's name when you are discussing them; doing so shows that you have not paid much attention to them or their work. So you should make a special effort to spell author names correctly, double and triple checking them against the original source, and ensuring that you spell them the same way each time.

Use appropriate pronouns

Use appropriate pronouns when referring to the authors. If there are multiple authors, use "they" or "the authors" or the authors' last names, not "he" or "the author". If there is only one author and you can determine the gender with great confidence, you may use "he" or "she"; otherwise use "the author" or the author's last name.

Avoid footnotes

Footnotes should be used quite sparingly, and should never be used as a way to avoid the hard work of making your text flow into a coherent narrative. Only when something genuinely cannot be made to fit into the main flow of the text, yet is somehow still so important that it must be mentioned, does it go into a footnote.

Be careful with arguments about grammar

If you are going to criticize the grammar or spelling of an author in writing, you should be extraordinarily careful to verify that you are correct. Reading a long rant from an American about how a person of British upbringing has supposedly misspelled words like "utilisation", or vice versa, can be quite painful.

There is no need to mention explicitly reading the paper

A lot of students use phrases like "while reading this paper, I ..." and "In this paper the authors ...". Try to avoid this redundancy. If you use the word "author" you need not also use "paper", and vice versa. Similarly, it is clear that whatever you discovered about the paper, you discovered while reading the paper; we do not need to be reminded of this. Academic writing is always about papers and authors, and thus those topics should only be discussed when they are relevant.

Discussing proposed work

In a research proposal, it is never acceptable to announce only that you are planning to "study topic X". In the context of research, studying is a vague and unbounded task, with no criterion for success and no way to tell if you are getting anywhere. Studying is something you do in a course, where someone can tell you what to focus on and can test you to see if you got the right answer; research is not like that. In research, you need to spell out the specific questions you are going to try to answer, the specific phenomena that need explanations, and so on -- it's up to you to define the question and the methods, and until you've done so, it's not research, just idle speculation.

Discussion/future work

In the discussion sections of a research paper, be sure to discuss all topics that the audience expected to see in the paper, even if you yourself do not believe them to be relevant. The reader is more likely to assume that you have been sloppy about your literature review than to assume you knew about the work but believed it not to be relevant. Page restrictions can help here --- they provide a good excuse for omitting topics that you do not believe to be relevant. In a longer article or thesis without page limits you have no choice but to address the issue and explicitly state why the topic is not relevant despite the common belief that it is.

"I" and "we"

Writing standards disagree about whether to use "I" and "we" (and their various forms) in academic work. Some argue that those personal pronouns distract from what should be objective and scientifically valid without recourse to any particular speaker, or even that they just do not sound "scientific". Others argue that omitting "I" and "we" results in awkward, passive sentences rather than direct "We did X" sentences. Personally, I believe that academic writing should use personal pronouns whenever what is being reported was an arbitrary and specific choice made by a human being, or for opinions or personal judgment, precisely because these pronouns emphasize that a human was involved in the work. When reporting universal scientific facts or observations, I would not use personal pronouns, because any reasonable observer would have reported similar results and thus there is no need to emphasize the role of the authors. Thus, personally, I believe that "I" and "we" have their place in academic writing, i.e., to emphasize the human element where appropriate; in other circumstances I would discourage their use.

Punctuation after quotations (this is NOT Ms. Hoffmann talking :-)

In American English (and in some cases for British English), punctuation following a bit of quoted text is traditionally placed inside the quotation. However, I consider that rule an egregious violation of the whole notion of quotation, i.e. an obvious bug in the English language. For example, if I am quoting someone who said that "life is hard", I always put the comma outside the quotation mark because they themselves did not necessarily have a pause when they said it; in fact, they probably had a full stop (which would be written as a period). Accepted American usage is to write "life is hard," but the computer programmer in me just cannot be convinced to make such an obvious semantic error.

Dangling prepositions

Officially, it is an error to end a sentence with a preposition, as in "they arrived at the place they were heading to". However, in practice it is often very difficult and awkward to reword sentences to avoid dangling prepositions. Thus I consider this rule to be optional at best.

Serial commas

In Britain and some other less-enlightened countries, the comma is often omitted before an 'and' in a list. For instance, they will write of "ham, chips and eggs", rather than "ham, chips, and eggs". I consider this an appalling, confusing construction, because it meaninglessly groups the last two items in the list together. Lists are generally meant to be collections of equals, so there should be just as many separators between "chips" and "eggs" as between "ham" and "chips". In many cases, omitting the serial comma is ambiguous. Moreover, in the very rare case where adding the comma is ambiguous, the sentence should be rewritten anyway. Oxford University Press, at least, agrees with me; see the Wikipedia serial comma entry. Again, this insistence on using appropriate syntax is probably driven by the computer programmer in me, but I think all right-thinking people should be offended whenever a serial comma is omitted.

Informal letter: 

John, I’m looking for a job, and I’ve heard through the grapevine that you need a workhorse for your shop. Well, I’m the man of the hour, as I’ve got a lot to offer. I’m pretty hard-working, and I’m really good about being on time. I’m also used to working by myself. Anyway, tell me whether you want to get together for an interview, okay? -Informal Joe

Formal/professional letter:

Dear John: I understand that you are looking for a strong worker to assist you in your shop. I would appreciate consideration because I am diligent, punctual, and accustomed to working with minimal supervision. Please contact me if you are interested in arranging an interview. I thank you for your time. Respectfully, Professional Joe

• Fellow - Avoid using "fellow" when you mean "a person." Calling someone a fellow is more formal than calling him or her a dude, but "fellow" is still a colloquialism.^[19]

• For sure - Replace "for sure" with "with certainty" in formal writing, as in "I know with certainty." You might also write, "I am positive" or "I am sure."

• Get - Avoid all forms of this verb in formal writing.
• I got an A in the course.
• I received an A in the course.
• She didn’t get the joke.
• She did not understand the joke.
• The machine never gets used.
• The machine is never used.
• 
  
• Got - "Got" is a colloquialism. Replace it with "have," as in "Do you have [not "got"] an extra pen?"
• Kind of, sort of - "Kind of" and "sort of" are unacceptable in formal writing when used for "somewhat" and "rather." When used to categorize something, "kind of" and "sort of" are acceptable, but "type of" is more formal: "The parakeet is a type of bird." Note that it is informal to include an article after "of": "The parakeet is a type of a bird."
• 
  
• Write without pronouns.
• Restructure sentences to avoid pronoun usage.
• Example:
• 1) When the director authorizes funds, he will consult with the treasurer.
• 2) The director will consult with the treasurer to authorize funds.