WRITING SKILLS
Importance is referenced , on average , seven times per paper . But don ’ t use that number as a guideline for your own writing since it is skewed by a few large values .
Instead aim for something closer to the mode of the distribution : three times per paper . Better yet , aim for a single thing being important .
Like “ important ”, but more assertive , is “ crucial ”. This is used far less often : it shows up in only 20 % of papers . And only 20 % of that 20 % uses it more than once . You might say that the comparatively limited usage of “ crucial ” is consistent with our propensity to hedge .
Figure 1 : How frequently “ we ” is used in each paper .
Leaving it for later
The cliché that something creates more questions than it answers often applies to science . Suggestions for future research are an acceptable approach to flesh out a discussion ( though you shouldn ’ t end with them ). Yet I was surprised at how few papers explicitly identify such suggestions .
“ Future study / studies / work / research / experiment ” showed up in 18 % of papers . “ Beyond the scope ” showed up in 9 %. “ Cannot explain ”, “ do not explain ” or “ does not explain ” showed up in 4 %.
Here ’ s where I might acknowledge the shortcoming of my methods and note that in future work I ’ d check whether there are phrases equivalent to those above that I forgot and thereby excluded from my counts . But this is a blog post , not a scientific paper , so ...
What isn ’ t cliché in scientific writing ?
Among the 360 papers , there ’ s a single use of “ gigantic ”. I also recently came across the hedge “ hopingly ,” which is sufficiently rare that WordPress is underlining it as a spelling mistake as I type . But , of course , single words don ’ t really count . Real answers to the question of what isn ’ t cliché might be humour , contractions , or one-word sentences and single-sentence paragraphs . I look forward to the days when these become common .
Endnotes
Asides inspired by the main text , but that didn ’ t quite fit . 1 . Regular clichés , like those in the second paragraph , seldom occur within the body text of scientific papers . Yet they are common fodder for titles , as shown by Google
Figure 2 : How frequently ‘’ important ’’ or “ importance ” is used in each paper .
Scholar searches for All in a day ’ s work , Back to square one , or Don ’ t judge a book by its cover .
2 . For a particularly notable academic cliché combination , consider one of the topic sentences in a well-known psychology paper : “ To clarify the distinctive nature of our proposal it is useful to briefly consider prior research on overconfidence ”. The first 17 of the 18 words are a generic framing of the only meaningful word in the sentence . ( Do check out the paper though . Its topic , the illusion of explanatory depth , is fascinating and relevant to the practice of science in general .)
3 . The Academic Phrasebank notes on its homepage that it was designed for non-native speakers of English , but it is the native speakers that have ended up as the majority of its users .
4 . I acknowledge that the fill-in-theblanks approach is a good way to get started writing , but some pushback against this approach is warranted .
5 . Like “ we ” and “ important / importance ”, another common word is “ data ”, which shows up , on average , 22 times per paper (“ dataset ” is included in this count ). 2 % of papers had triple-digit usage . Conversely , 22 of the 360 papers did not use the word . Of those 22 papers , 20 were focused on either theory or simulations .
6 . Awkward second-person references are worse than third-person . 10 % of papers mentioned “ the reader ”, whereas < 1 % of papers mentioned “ you ” in any second-person sense . ( That 10 % excludes the boilerplate phrase used in 10 papers that “ the reader is referred to the web version of this article ” [ for colour figures ].)
7 . In a similar vein to “ the author ” and “ the reader ”, there ’ s the phrase “ this paper ”. This phrase is used in 60 % of papers . On average , it was used 1.4 times per paper , which is reasonable . Four of the 360 papers , however , had double-digit uses of the phrase .
8 . I wanted to include stats for “ possible / possibly ” in the hedging section . But these words are can be used in many ways other than hedging , so I left them out . Similarly , I excluded “ critical ” in the importance section as that has specific meanings in my field .
9 . The heading This is important . That ’ s important . Everything is important should be read in Oprah ’ s voice .
10 . Rather than proclaiming importance where it ’ s not due , this paper is more honest : “ From a practical perspective , that result , of course , is only moderately interesting .”
47 Grassroots Vol 21 No 1 March 2021