14: Style- Shaping Our Sentences
- Page ID
- 27131
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Learning Outcomes
- Recognize clarity as the first priority in academic writing.
- Edit out repetition and wordiness.
- Revise sentences to feature characters as subjects and actions as main verbs.
- Use parallelism to create balanced sentences.
- Employ varied sentence structures to make prose more engaging.
- Feel empowered to decipher convoluted academic prose.
- 14.1: What Defines Good Style in Academic Writing?
- Academic writing does not need to be formal or wordy; clarity is what makes for good style.
- 14.2: Keeping It Concise
- If we edit out repetition and wordiness, we make our writing more engaging.
- 14.3: Making Sentences Clear
- Readers experience writing as clear when the “character” of a sentence is also its subject and the key action is the main verb.
- 14.4: Giving the Reader Pleasure
- Readers often find balanced sentences and phrases pleasing.
- 14.5: Understanding Convoluted Sentences
- Recognizing that a simpler point may be hiding behind complex sentence structure and word choice can help us decipher challenging academic texts.
- 14.6: Sentence Variety
- We can make our writing more engaging for readers by using an assortment of sentence patterns, rhythms, and lengths.
