Empty Phrases

Good writing is more than just figuring out which words to put on the page. Good writing has just as much to do with figuring out which words you don't need. As I've written before, a writer's job is not just to get what's in his or her head onto the page, it is to make sure what is in his or her head gets into the reader's brain. Something is "well written" when a reader expends as little mental energy as possible in understanding the writer's intent.

One simple thing you can do to improve your writing, then, is to avoid using too many words. The more words you use to express a point, the more work your reader has to do to understand your point.

Here's a very common example of what I mean. Read the following two sentences:

The results demonstrated that Long-Evans rats took more trials to learn the maze than Sprague-Dawley rats.

Long-Evans rats took more trials to learn the maze than Sprague-Dawley rats.

Both sentences are perfectly acceptable, but notice that the words "The results demonstrated that" are superfluous. Variations of this show up time and again in papers written for psychology class. The following phrases are hardly ever useful:

• The authors demonstrated that
• The graph reveals that
• The data show that
• The experimenters concluded that

I call these "empty phrases". They are words that you've forced a reader to read that don't help a single bit. Phrases like this clutter your writing. These examples aren't particularly difficult to understand, but when a paper is littered with empty phrases in complex sentences, the reader is left with the impression that the writing is padded and unnecessarily difficult.

After finishing a draft of a document, read it with a critical eye, and hunt down and eliminate these empty phrases. Economize where possible. Scientific writing often requires that you use long sentences in order to specify details clearly, so it becomes especially important that you avoid long sentences when you can.