Have you ever felt that something is wrong with your paper before you have completed it? Most students regularly get in a situation like this. Sometimes you do not have much to say and you start writing off-topic . Or perhaps you make a lot of grammatical or stylistic mistakes that make your essay incomprehensible to a reader. These and more factors can make your writing awkward. The good news is you can get rid of your bad habits and improve every academic paper you complete. In this article, we will give you a few tips on how to write fine academic papers and not feel awkward about them.

What is an awkward sentence?

An awkward paper is not the one making your reader shake his or her head. Just on the contrary, in the academic community, it refers to a low-quality piece that looks annoying or confusing to a recipient. There are a few solid reasons behind this reaction.

If you are an English language learner, you may borrow wrong syntactic constructions from your mother tongue or use some patterns that sound weird to a native English speaker. In most cases, an improper use of language is the source of confusion. However, some bad writing habits may also kill the clarity of your essay. Here are some points for you to consider when writing your paper.

Most common mistakes that make a sentence awkward

Wordiness

Does it ever happen that you want to say a lot and manage to squeeze it all into a single sentence? In this case, your writing gets too wordy. Most often, it is not factual information that adds volume to the text. Students tend to overuse “empty” words that do not fit in academic writing. In the end, you cannot get the idea of the text, as it gets lost in words and expressions that do not contribute to it in any positive way.

Unclear structure

Every student knows that any text is normally divided into paragraphs. Nevertheless, many people forget about that as they start to put their thoughts into writing. If you have tons to say on your topic, you can get carried away with thoughts easily. You can forget to insert pauses in your text, which makes it unreadable. Just like wordiness, a bad structure can spoil every good idea you express in your text.

Wrong syntactic composition

As an English language learner, you may confuse the way you create sentences in your native language and in English. You may combine clauses that do not fit together or make lengthy sentences. Or perhaps you insert many words between the subject and the predicate, which makes it impossible to comprehend who did what. Again, some word combinations you use may sound odd to a native English speaker.

Passive constructions

Academic writing often tempts us to use passive voice. In many cases, we think a doer of an action is unnecessary to a reader. Nevertheless, active voice makes our writing more people-friendly, i.e. easy to understand. It is okay to use passive constructions in highly formal writing, but your college essay will look better without them.

Improper stylistics

In academic writing, style is just as important as grammar. A high school essay is different from a PhD dissertation, so both of these papers require a different academic style. Many students make their assignments overly formal when it’s not needed. Your teacher cares about your ideas. He or she also cares that your written language corresponds to the type of paper and its purpose.

A few tips to make your essay clear to a reader

Now that you know the typical mistakes that make writing awkward, you can avoid them in your papers. Taking into account the most common bad writing habits, we have drawn up a few tips to help you write better.

Use the direct word order and active voice in your sentences

Let the predicate follow the subject and arrange the rest of the sentence according to the direct word order of the English language. Try to use active voice whenever possible.

Insert transitional words to preserve the logic of your writing

Use words like despite, however, consequently, in addition, as a result, etc. to mark the sequence of thoughts in your paper.

Break your text into paragraphs

Single out some key ideas of your essay and describe them consistently. Do not state your thoughts in the way that they occur. For every new idea, start a new paragraph. It is better to create more small sections than a few large ones.

Avoid empty words

Don’t use words that do not have any meaning, such as really, actually, just, in fact, as a matter of fact, etc. Try to use as many notional words as possible. They will help you complete a precise and comprehensible paper.

If you are a beginner, also consider the following:

• Let a friend read your paper. Ask others whether they understand your writing.
• Hang out with native English speakers. Get at ease with live spoken language to avoid formal cliches.
• Mind your grammar. Keep learning to avoid typical mistakes that can spoil your paper.

Now you can write a good essay that is also easy to read and to understand. At first, it may be difficult to get rid of empty words and keep your thoughts well-organized, but your writing will improve with every paper.