Im told my writing is hard to understand, waffley, or ungrammatical. How can I start to improve it?
The most common problem in this area is overlong sentences. If you’d always thought academic writing had to have long complex sentences, forget it! Write concise, clear ones. Use logical words (such as ‘therefore’, ‘however’, ‘on the other hand’, more here: http://www.studyguide.org/transitions_in_essays.htm) to make the relationships between sentences clear. Make sure that each sentence has a main verb in it – don’t break long sentences without giving each one a main verb. If you don’t know what a ‘main verb’ is then do a basic grammar workout here http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/grammar/. At a more advanced stage, when you are able to write more clearly, it will be good to include a mixture of long and short sentences in your writing, but this is a stylistic consideration and clarity of meaning comes before style! VOCABULARY: I’m trying to use academic language but being told my writing is hard to understand. Are you using a thesaurus? A common mistake is to replace a known wor
