Form simple sentences with complex nouns.

This is to bust the myth about writing long sentences “to impress” readers. Yes, grammar teachers would tell you to “demonstrate sentence variety”, but academic writing is not English composition competition, let alone the fact that most students cannot handle long, meandering sentences. We expect simplicity instead.

How simple? It is “SVO” kind of simple.

If you analyse sentences in journal articles, it isn’t hard to discover this pattern dominating the text. You will still find subordinate clauses and non-defining clauses, but expert writers often expand the nouns instead.

Expanding the nouns involves three main strategies: adding adjectives before the head noun, adding prepositional phrases or embedded clauses after it, or condensing a clause into a noun phrase through the process of nominalisation.

Among the three strategies, nominalisation is one of the most important processes of choosing main ideas, rewriting them and combining nominalised clauses to form a new sentence. This rewriting process makes a text more concise, is also a process of generalisation in technical writing, and most importantly, the key strategy of “paraphrasing”.

I made a short video explaining the function of nominalisation. You can also watch it here:

The two pieces of advice this week have also covered the terms “cohesion”, “conciseness” and “paraphrasing” in the grammatical sense. Hopefully, my explanations can make these writing skills more explicit; after all, we need to know the language for achieving those skills.

The knowledge about language gives us a framework to think about grammar and its relationship with meaning, cognitive skills and the subject knowledge.

References
Halliday, M. A. (2005). On matter and meaning: The two realms of human experience. Linguistics & the Human Sciences, 1(1), 59-82.