Hone your Writing, Part 2

Maria Lahman was the Mentor in Residence for November 2021, Academic Writing Month (AcWrMo.) She is a professor at The University of Northern Colorado in the Department of Applied Statistics and Research Methods, where she teaches qualitative research methods. She is the author of Writing and Representing Qualitative Research, and the relevant text, Ethics in Social Science Research: Becoming Culturally Responsive. Use the code MSPACEQ423 for a 20% discount through December 2023.

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 Don’t miss an earlier blog entry on honing where I explain what the concept means in this topic, why academic writers should attend to it, and give some tips. I want to forward some important aspects of writing that are not easily grouped into a unifying section so I will call it paraphernalia—bits and bobs, miscellany, paraphernalia—first person, avoid localism, repetition, over qualifying and pointless self-reference, contractions, punctuation, and parallel form.

First Person Whenever Possible

See Hone Your Writing, Part 1 for more tips from Dr. Maria Lahman!

Traditionally, style guides for researchers indicate that the third person should be used. However, in several editions of the APA style guide, first person has been recommended. APA has reviewed the reasons why first person is preferable. First, the phrase “the authors” or “the researchers” to indicate in third person the authors of the current article can be confused with the authors and/or researchers of the literature that is being referenced. Second, anthropomorphism, while an important part of creative literature, becomes a deadly prop for the third-person and “objective” voice in third-person research writing—such as “studies demonstrate” and “research finds,” instead of “we demonstrated” or “I found” (McAdoo, 2009)

Additionally, researchers have been taught to write in the third person in order to seem objective. This is the primary reason why qualitative researchers should write in the first person. Qualitative research is based on a rejection of false notions of objectivity. Qualitative researchers actively attempt to engage with our bias, understanding that people cannot be objective. For us, a false sense of objectivity is not a goal. Instead, we seek deep, reflexive engagement with our biases. Qualitative researchers write in the first person so readers can access the research in active ways that help deepen their understanding of the contexts and phenomena of interest.

Avoid Localism

Your readers may be—and you hope they will be—from all over the world, so avoid localism. Writing only in a local context is a problem for authors, in particular for those of us from the United States. This is a type of nationalism we must rigorously edit out of our work since it signals a myopic perspective to global readership groups. An example—when writing about early childhood education, as a U.S. citizen, I would most likely say that children were in the “first grade.” In other countries, this phrase does not always have the same meaning. Instead state the age of the children as 6 to 7 years old and that they are in their first year of full-day school, commonly referred to as first grade in the United States. Another example is referring to a study as occurring in a particular state, province, region—without a country reference. It is appropriate to say the study took place in Colorado, USA.

Remove Pointless Repetition

Avoid towering behemoths, sobbing and weeping clients, beginning preservice teachers, and childish kids in your writing. Identify unnecessary repetition of words that when removed do not alter meaning in the sentence. Avoid the tiresome threes—three supporting sentences to every topic sentence, three descriptive words for every point.

Overly Qualifying and Pointless Self-Reference

Avoid overly qualifying and pointless self-reference. Academic writers tend to qualify statements—“it may be,” “in some cases,” “in certain ways.” Editing overuse of qualification and self-referral allows your writing to sound confident.

Use Contractions

As someone who lived in the South of the United States for most of my life, I appreciate the welcoming feel of contractions wherever they pop up. I am suspicious that avoiding contractions is another form of the racism, regionalism, and classism that seems accepted without comment in academia—controlling the language of groups that are othered. On a lighter note, I fully expect to start seeing contractions more frequently in formal qualitative writing. Contemporarily, style guides allow for some qualified use of contractions. APA’s blog pointed out contractions keep writing from sounding stuffy and allows contractions in brief editorial types of asides and in footnotes. Qualitative research writers should continue to use contractions in participants’ quotes, in quotes from literature that uses contractions, and when writing non-traditional forms (e.g., autoethnography, poetry), but in many fields avoid unnecessary use of contractions in formal research posters and traditional articles.

Punctuation

Give the em dash—a helpful form of punctuation—a try. In academic writing, you will never go wrong using traditional punctuation: colons, commas, semicolons. Contemporary use of the semicolon and colon have changed in nonfiction writing, with writers’ preferences often being the em dash—a long dash achieved on a Mac keyboard by holding down the shift and option key and then typing the hyphen. Zinsser (2006) says “there is a 19th-century mustiness that hangs over the semi-colon…it should be used sparingly by modern writers. . . . The colon has begun to look even more antique” but is still helpful in the case of lists.

“Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons—in each case to slightly different effect. …the em dash is best limited to two appearances per sentence. Otherwise, confusion rather than clarity is likely to result” (The Punctuation Guide, n.d.).

Use of Parallel Form

Parallel Form or structure occurs when a writer uses the same form for similar items. This may be within a sentence, a paragraph, or entire document.

Examples of parallel form are usually given within one sentence, as in “For work, I wait tables, juggled, and am an Uber driver” being rewritten in parallel form as “For work, I wait tables, juggle, and drive for Uber,”

An example of parallel form in paragraphs or sections of a research paper follows. If you write “first,” then what follows should be “second” and “third,” not “secondly” and “furthermore.”

References

thepunctuaationguide.com

McAdoo, T. (2009). Use of first person in APA style. APA Style Blog. https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/use-of-first-person-in-apa-style.html

Zinsser, W. (2006). On writing well: The classic guide to writing nonfiction (7th ed.). HarperCollins.

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