Improving Research Writing for Publication (Full Lecture)

[Music] good afternoon ladies and gentlemen my name is Kevin Hines as she mentioned I am I'm a Content Manager and senior editor at word vise and we are a global editing company I'm very honored to be here speaking with you today at the transplantation Society of Taiwan my presentation is going to be quite a bit different than the ones you've seen prior this isn't going to be about medical techniques or innovations it's going to be about manuscripts and something you're probably all very familiar with specifically I want to bring your attention to ways in which you as an author of a manuscript can self edit your work and thereby increase your chance of being published in journals to what you are applying and I know that publishing in journals is extremely important especially if you work in academic environments or at many professional companies drug companies you want to have a higher profile so in the world of clinical research writing rejection by journals is not the exception but the norm probably everybody in this room has been rejected at some point from a journal so it's not something to be ashamed about or lose sleep over but if we really want to get our work published in a scientific journal then the question we have to ask is why exactly are our manuscripts being rejected so one answer that we have to this question is that there is a deficiency in the quality of writing and a great many of the manuscripts that are submitted so there's thousands of manuscripts submitted to to scientific journals and while the scientific research is in many ways novel provides a contribution has extreme quality of research the quality of writing parameters sometimes is lacking so that's what I want to focus on today so what exactly do we mean by quality of writing it's not an equal meaning to quality of research but rather refers to the way in which the research is presented in the words and ex nation in the manuscript so we want to divide this today into two categories and I'll be talking about manuscript content as well as writing and Composition when I talk about manuscript content issues I mean consistency of material is the material consistent and logical in its exposition does the title match the actual topic that you're writing about is the abstract up-to-date with all the findings in the paper and when we discuss inclusion of appropriate content its Excel phix planetory but do the introductions the methods results in discussion section all include all of the necessary information do they include too much information so we'll be looking at those and the second part of my presentation will discuss writing and Composition issues now this refers to using correct grammar and writing style effective writing style and since style affects the readability the comprehension and engagement with readers of a particular journal this is extremely important to to journal editors and publishers for the ultimate goal of the journal is to have it be read by a wide readership so the whole purpose of this presentation is to give you practical ways to improve the quality of your writing what I want to convince you is that by acting in the role of researcher author and editor all three of those manuscript writers can take control when it comes to getting their work published so to add to this evidence that quality of writing does play a role in our journal acceptance or rejection I want to show you a 2013 study of papers that were submitted to medical journals and these were papers based in African and Asian countries some of the journals you may even be familiar with in this study there were 42 papers analyzed and there they found crucial flaws in every section of the manuscripts just a few stats from these nearly 68% had problems in the introduction and results section so almost 70% introduction and results 86% had flaws and material and methods section and 71% in the discussion section so as you can see the errors are manifold and various throughout the essay but what do we mean by flaws um the author gives some details about this in the results they discussed that there's insufficient background information an appropriate review of literature a lack of clear problem statement and research objectives an introduction whose lengths were inappropriate and there's actually quite a bit more I thought this was particularly interesting the end of the results here the authors say that a large proportion of the reviewed articles lacked good grammatical writing so since that's a central issue we're talking about today I hope you can take it to heart and pay attention to this well a minority lacked scientific validity or originality so basically that means that regardless of the quality of research methodology etc if the quality of writing wasn't up to snuff the manuscript was rejected so there's ample evidence to suggest that this is a serious concern for all researchers who wish to get published especially in leading journals one more excerpt from this isn't in the conclusion section the authors say that manuscripts had remarkable errors there is a need for attention to detail in study design manuscript preparation and that further training of medical scientists and the techniques for manuscript writing for journal publication is needed so that is exactly what we're discussing today so how can manuscript authors be aware of where they are making the mistakes and content I want you to think about this as a checklist so this is some common content errors by section well we won't go into great detail just using it as a checklist while you edit and revise your manuscript you can ask yourself whether your paper has any of these deficiencies so let's just go through each section and we'll give a couple examples for each so the first is misleading or obscure titles a title that does not set the limits of the study right at the beginning is a serious error for example a basic investigation that uses an animal model might should mention in its title that the study is an animal study you might think that's kind of an odd example but as an editor we see this a lot we see that the title is way off base and we realized that the majority of manuscripts that we edits are from non-native English speakers and because most of the international journals are written in English this is a disadvantage for non-native speakers but there are ways that you can correct for this and we will show you that the second section is inaccurate abstract abstracts are written sometimes several months before the paper is written so there is some often a discrepancy between the abstract and the content within the manuscript so if you are about to be submitting your managed manuscript for publication you should always check the abstract and make sure it's updated with the recently acquired data that you have in the body of your paper next section that has errors is the introduction so the introduction should follow the form of an outline right it should give the contain the study question hypothesis and study objectives if all of this information is not specified if the importance of the study is not shown it's considered a major error so you want to make sure you have all of the required elements listed in your introduction we'll go through these quickly since we're a little short on time today careless methods sometimes the authors will have the same methods in a previous study as they do for a current study and they will copy those methods and paste them into their manuscript and this is actually self plagiarism and it's a serious problem so you want to make sure to write your section every time you have a new manuscript next section is omitted results so the results section as with most adhere to a word limit so authors will often leave some information out either intentionally or unintentionally for example not all the study subjects might be accounted for in the study or the names are not provided for for specific analysis so you need to make sure and write out all the results as well and last is the discussion section so view some many common errors in that it's the discussion section for instance the flow of ideas is disconnected or not supported the content is too expansive and wanders from the results key results are poorly explained and the studies limitations are not described so again I want you to look at this as a checklist looking at each section and analyzing it during the editing process and a good way to do that is not only look at it on your own but always a good rule of thumb is to always have a peer whether someone working on the study with you or someone in a unrelated field even so you have an objective view and to make sure that everything is complete in these sections today we're just going to look at titles and abstract in a little greater detail so I want to drive home this point about the beginning of your manuscript being essential and how you present how you present and using quality of writing as a crucial criteria so dr. Paul T Wong assesses seven common reasons why submissions are rejected and he talks about quality of writing being a crucial criteria so he writes some simple suggestions that you might follow simply by let's see an editor or reviewer can decide whether a manuscript is good simply by reading the abstract or the first couple paragraphs because this is the first chunk of the manuscript that editors and reviewers see they're going to base their judgment upon the quality of the research and the quality of the writing and the importance of the writing based upon these first sections so he advises that you Speight pay a special attention to the quality of writing in the abstract as well as the first paragraph and he doesn't mention this explicitly but we're going to throw in the title because the title is the most viz part of the manuscript to researchers to anybody that is looking through a database for a manuscript so let's start with the title I want to give you some tips for crafting an appropriate title and again this will be in a checklist form so there's no hard and fast rules the rule of thumb is to read through the journals that you want to submit to and see what their guidelines are and see what they what the sort of structure that they follow so tip number one is keep it short avoid filler words like the effects of a comparison of a case study of and this is pretty par for the course in manuscripts you can see these a lot these terms the fact is that they're not essential if they're not essential if your study it has a very long title already you want to get rid of these because the longer your title the harder it is to search for don't use questions or complete sentences in the title a phrase is often the best way to go don't use abbreviations in your title there are some exceptions to this such as if you are using a an acronym that is widely known interdisciplinary like such as DNA but otherwise don't use too specific abbreviations within the title save that for after the abstract you want to narrow the scope of what is in your paper so if you have a paper that is about the gastrointestinal diseases in 70 or year-olds in Seville Spain writing a title that reads disorders of the stomach and elderly Spanish people is too broad right it's it's definitely too broad for it what your paper is about so you need to keep it narrow but you also want to use key words that other researchers will use so the balance of narrowing your scope and using general keywords to have a greater chance of hitting upon your manuscript in the database is the real trick of the title and one way to do that is to put important terms at the beginning and at the end of your title so if you have a case study at the beginning it's less likely to get a hit if you have the content the real focus of your study at the beginning it's easier to see and it's more likely to result in a keyword hit and last on this list again research the journal database you really need to do your homework before you submit to any publication nature is a different magazine than psychology is a different publication than medical publications so you really need to know your readership you really need to know what the reviewers of the journals are looking for so you have to really think about this holistically think about how you are you're presenting your manuscript to the audience that reads those journals so let's look at some explicit ways how we can revise our title so here I have written I've actually taken this from from a publication but changed it just a little bit we have quite a long title as you can see a case study that assesses the impact of program volume and Composition on waiting list outcomes and pediatric kidney transplantation so if you can tell there's a couple things wrong with this one is it's really long and - it has a lot of extra words we don't need so the first thing you might do to change this title is to eliminate is to eliminate the case study as we mentioned that's not the most important and next that assesses right because you're referring to the case study you don't need to talk about what it does so a more straightforward and active looking title would read like this assessing the impact of program volume etc so at the beginning you have the physical a powerful word about what your study is doing and at the end you have the content the important term pediatric kidney transplantation another example the associations between bleeding and thrombosis and ventricular assist device therapy a four year longitudinal study I want you to look at it for five seconds and see what parts you might trim to make it look nicer and and leaner again the beginning the associations between when you have two ideas we already assumed that there are associations between them and the structure of the study the methodology a four year longitudinal study it's interesting information it's not essential in the title so we can make it a little bit tighter and write the focus at the beginning bleeding and thrombosis associated with ventricular assist device therapy looks a lot nicer and the manuscripts the journals that you send it to will undoubtedly think so as well so let's move on to the abstract the abstract is the pivot point of a paper because many Journal editorial boards screen their manuscripts based only on the abstract even though you're paying the publishers money to read your work these people are human they have thousands of manuscripts to read and if they're abstract doesn't do it for them does not tell them what they need your menu script might end up in the garbage and you don't want that right so again let's think about these suggestions as a practical checklist number one completeness how do you know when you have enough information in your abstract a simple rule of thumb is to imagine that you are another researcher you're doing a search for a similar study but it's not this exact same study you come upon your abstract you should ask yourself if if this abstract was the only part of the paper that you can access if you don't have a membership to scribd e would you be happy with the amount of information presented here does it tell the whole story about your study if the answer is no then the abstract needs to be revised and you need to spend a lot of time on your abstract of course whether this structure whether the abstract is structured or unstructured is very important and again you can find this out by looking at the guidelines of the journal looking at other manuscripts that that journal has published if it calls for explicit structure you certainly want to write that out don't overlook overlook these things it's a good way to weed out your paper from the field next writing style so you want to I want to say this with a caveat use the active voice whenever possible per the content of the given journals I might say this a few more times for the content of the given journal active voice conveys a clearer message of subject and predicate however in many journals in throughout the last 20 or 30 years the passive voice has sort of been the de rigueur the way to go in manuscripts this doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way to write but if your journal that you're submitting to tends to use a lot more passive you might consider using that but keep in mind that if your entire manuscript is written in the passive voice it's much harder to read even for native speakers it's not as readable and therefore usually not as interesting you want to again write the abstract last avoid all abbreviations excessive jargon or confusing terms think about your abstract similarly to the title you want it to be understood by a wider audience and last your abstract should not contain these things lengthy background information if you are doing a study on the bottlenose dolphin in the Caribbean you don't want to write about the entire history of the bottlenose dolphin in your abstract a simple summary one sentence summary will suffice you do not want to reference other literature explicitly in your abs correct you do not want to use ellipses or incomplete sentences and this seems obvious but again as editors we see this a lot and changing the abstract is a bit touchy as an editor because we do not want to change your intended meaning and your important content because the abstract is so important and last don't use don't reference visual aids and make reference to them in the abstract it's simply a waste of time and space so in 2016 our company or advise analyzed several million words on the papers we received in the previous year and we did this to find out exactly where the most errors occurred and to help our clients understand these errors the more they understand the easier our job becomes as well so we broke these down into several categories we have style at 32% word choice 22% and grammar at 21% of the edits we make in total so these are the lion's share of the errors that we see in our manuscripts and to look further at grammar which we will be looking at first we found that there's definitely some that are more prevalent than others verb forms were 6% these are a little tricky to analyze with there's lots of algorithms that we use but subject verb agreement at 12% prepositions 12% and determiners were 62% of the edits that we made now determiners refers to articles a and this that really small seemingly not non important elements in your paper but when you add them up they're extremely important and they affect quality of writing tremendously so let's discuss three of these top issues that we found these problems that we found the first we're going to discuss is verb tense as you probably all know the purpose of the verb tense is to indicate the timing or action of a conditions existence the definition of a verb surprisingly many researchers are confused about which tends to use when they describe the research and I don't blame them there's specific rules for the different style formatting guides so you have to be careful of which to use but here's a quick guide of witched inches you should generally use generally speaking you use the past tense when you're discussing prior research dr. Watson asserted that the mice in Group B would be blind so this is a prior research not in this study you use the past tense when discussing the result or observation made during your study when you're observing the mice in Group B the mice in Group B developed tumors in their parietal lobes okay so these are you talk about these as you would a a real event in life right it's your observations in the present tense you want to use present tense for general facts such as the Earth revolves around the Sun scientific laws etc the subject of a sentence when the subject of a sentence is your paper or your study our study demonstrates our work focuses on you want to use present tense when discussing a conclusion or interpretation of current findings so this is again your findings or another's your speculation entropy may be involved in in this phenomenon let's look more closely at some examples again these are past tense and these are general rules so here's some examples of using prior research the Balan group hypothesized that there would be an increase in air pressure many studies have done throughout throughout the 20th century have confirmed this affinity between carbon and nitrogen this is not your research others research observations in your study we observed that mice in B group who were exposed to radiation developed parietal lobe tumors tumor cells in test Group C metastasized upon exposure to this chemical let's look at some present tense examples general facts air due pressure decreases with altitude if you were to use the tens here your readership might confuse it with an observation that you made in your study and certainly you're not trying to break a lot of physics or examine you know a general law so if you're stating a fact air pressure air pressure decreases with altitude it's a general fact the average human skeleton contains 270 bones at birth this number decreases to 206 bones in adulthood right when the subject of your sentence is your work this study confirms previous findings our research indicates that a majority of healthy kidney donors and notice as a side note here there this is an active voice right to change this you might write our previous findings were confirmed by this study this is a lot takes a lot fewer words and we'll talk more about that interpretation of current findings comorbidity appears to be a factor so these are implications or your interpretations of what your study is revealing the results of past studies tend to corroborate this evidence I can give you a million more examples but let's move on to article use because article use was such an enormous component I don't want to insult you by by thinking that I miss I'm assuming you do not understand how to use articles however because there's so many mistakes in this section I want to start by giving you a quiz so which articles should you use a or n the indefinite article the the definite article or no article so I'll give you a couple seconds for each and you can choose in your mind which one you think should be applied here we analyzed variety of tissue samples I'll let you answer in your mind as well you don't you don't have to shout it out but we analyzed a variety of tissue samples experts identified like surrounding the combined compound as a source of infection in the question answer experts identified the lake surrounding the compound as the source of the infections in question third mm colors affect our perception of reality we do not need an article for this you may be wondering if you missed any of these what the reasons are and let me tell you for time purposes I'm going to skip these next quiz questions and move to this chart which shows how to use uncountable nouns how to apply articles to uncountable nouns a noun is countable if as the word suggests the noun can be counted so apples are countable chairs are countable a noun is uncountable if it is not counted such as liquids water or it is broken down into too many parts sand so you do not say one water to water three waters four waters simply water so let's first look at these uncountable when it comes to uncountable nouns the articles a and an cannot be used with the nouns therefore the only choice you have is really using the the in depth or the definite article or no article at all so let's win let's see when you should use the or when you should use no article so when any when you're referring to any of the countable noun use the noun with no articles alright drinking water has many benefits love is a strong emotion you're referring to any of the noun right so you're not referring to this love or that love or this water you're talking about all water when you're referring to one specific noun in space in time you will use the it's a bit confusing sometimes you wish English didn't have articles at home so let's look at example one the water is blue well what's the difference between simply water is blue and the water is blue we know with this definite in a definite article the that we're referring to a specific water and perhaps we've referred to it earlier in our study so we know which water we are pointing to we examined the water bordering the town so you here you have the same structure except here you have a modifier that shows where it is a prepositional phrase bordering the town let's move on to countable nouns so comfortable now is you have a bit more options we must look at whether we are talking generally about the countable noun or about a specific example of the countable noun similar rule to uncountable so let's start with when we are looking at one member of that noun you use a or up with that now this is when you're not referring to any specific member but any amongst the members to be abstract about it maybe your son or daughter has said dad mom I want a car right they don't say I want the car unless perhaps you they're a little too spoiled and they can choose whichever car they want they say I want a car I want one amongst many for the purposes of driving let's move down to all members of the noun generally use the noun with no articles colors can affect our perception if you think if you look back to the uncountable nouns drinking water has many benefits love is a strong emotion it's the same principle it's the same rule right but it's pluralized colors can affect our emotion because colors is countable scientists have been researching this issue for decades all scientists were not talking about specific scientists again if you were to say the scientist the reader will will imagine you're referring to a specific group of scientists the cardiac cardiac specialists at this hospital have been researching this issue for decades than you would use the definite the right last one the countable noun as a whole group used the the elephant is a large animal the harp is a difficult instrument to learn so you're referring to the entire group that that noun belongs in let's move on to the third of grammar that we will discuss and that is parallelism to give you a brief summary of what parallelism is it's having the same sections of a sentence that contains more than one component having them be the same set up using the same verb or the same number and I'll show you what we mean but many native speakers as well tend to use parallel non parallel structures and this creates awkward it's very awkward to read in addition to being grammatically wrong so when we use strings of words we want to make sure each part has equal value okay so in each of these examples there is a mistake and I wonder if you can try to guess that mistake in your head I like apples oranges and going to the zoo let's just check these first so the non parallel part of the sentence is going to the zoo because apples and oranges are simply object or objective case right I like apples whereas going to the zoo is a verbal phrase so you have noun noun verbal phrase so it's not parallel in number to the coach advised that I should eat healthily exercise regularly and that joining a gym would make this easier so the nonparallel item is in red here why is it non parallel well you have eat healthily so you have this verb an adverb combination exercise regularly and here you have a relative freight relative pronoun face that going that joining a gym would make us easier so it's not it doesn't match with the others last mary is a celebrated author dancer and writes great songs here you have the word is and we see this the most often of any of the nonparallel sentences in my experience I would say we see this with the linking verb is Mary is an author she is a dancer and she is a no she's not a great song she writes great songs it's not fair with the others so let's talk about how we can fix these phrases there's a lot I want to say there's a lot of resources on the internet it's very obvious but I would find whichever paradigm whichever resource that that you can use the most simply and and which makes sense to you and look through your manuscript and apply these rules as much as tedious as that is so the method one you should make the grammatically non-conforming parts match the other parts so and here's the non parallel sentence the coach advised that I should eat healthily exercise regularly and that joining a gym would make this easier so we're going to just change part three so it matches the other two the coach advised that I should eat healthily exercise regularly and join a gym so we have eat exercise joint it reads better it's it's nicer it makes more sense and the editor doesn't have to do it for you if you can do it yourself hey method to make the other parts match the grammatically non parallel part so opposite you have the first two parts changing to part three so I like apples oranges and going to the zoo if you want to make your sentence more active you would switch it to that verb form I like eating apples eating oranges and going to the zoo either one is acceptable it depends on what which component of the phrase you want to focus on you like the the object or you like the action of doing these things method three split the sentence from a reader's perspective in in scientific manuscripts often we see sentences that are five or six lines long and as much punctuation as you use as many commas as you can use that often makes reading extremely difficult for even for the most the smartest and most well-educated and immersed scientists and reviewers so splitting the sentence really just makes it shorter and easier to digest the coach advised that I should eat healthily exercise regularly and that joining a gym would make this easier so let's make it another a second sentence here the coach advised that I should eat healthily and exercise regularly period he also told me that joining a gym would make this working out easier you are adding a couple words but it's it's much easier to to read and you can add another element of meaning if you have a second sentence I'm going to skip this section for the sake of time but let's look at just some examples there's other ways that your sentence can be nonparallel and there's ways to fix it dozens of them so let's just look at a couple I like the big house built in 1910 and features two great living rooms that gives me a headache just reading it I like the big house built in 1910 that features two great living rooms right so this is the same thing part a the big house and the house the big house features two great living rooms to use the relative pronoun bet I not only like to play the violin but also dancing right here we have a just a regular infinitive verb I not only like to play the violin but I also like to dance or I'm not only I like to not only play the violin but also dents the verb form is the same I prefer to go on a vacation Venna bonus we're missing the infinitive here right and in the verb I prefer to go on a vacation than to receive a bonus one way you can check for these manually in your manuscript would be to underline all the verbs all the nouns that you use and make sure that the corresponding if you have a longer sentence with with more than two parts that they are all parallel so look at the each noun themselves and the accompanying verbs that go with them okay next we're going to talk about writing style so in our breakdown of these papers we found that overwhelmingly the passive voice and wordiness accounted for the majority of style issues and I want to reiterate what I had said earlier that this is not a hard and fast rule to say don't use the passive voice only use the active far from it and editors have a difficult time discerning when the the author would like us to use the passive inactive it's simply the regardless of how good the editor is they have to make that call and it could change your meaning your intended meaning to some extent so you want to be able to make that decision for yourself so regarding the use of active passive voice it's it's advisable to to use the active if you can with an agent so again you want to research the journal that you are going to be submitting to so let's but with that being said let's see how style affects your manuscripts readability so active and passive voice so here we have a sentence that includes a combination of active sorry a paragraph that includes a combination of active and passive voice sentences and I think ultimately that is the way to go because then you have a different sentence lengths you're varying your your style and that is ultimately making it more readable for your readers as well so here we have next-generation sequencing studies have tremendously advanced our understanding of the genes in the green we have the active voice because you want to you want to focus on this is your your focus content it's that your the next-generation sequencing studies are the central part of of this study I assume so start with that and then use the active voice it really shows the what the importance of this element is these efforts have identified core sets of driver genes that are frequently mutated so here it's it's clear why we would use the active voice because the efforts are the important element the efforts have identified core sets of values but here the genes are frequently mutated we don't have an agent we can't say nature mutates the genes it it just doesn't make sense so when we have we don't have an agent present to to give active voice it's better to use the passive passive voice genes are mutated cancers were largely resolved resolved by whom we don't have an agent to say it doctor dr. X resolved the cancers so it's much better to use passive in those instances let's keep moving on here so how do you change the passive voice to the active voice you need to identify the true subject and reorder your sentence to establish the subject-verb-object order so here we have the speech was given by the mayor the agent is the mayor right so simply put the the predicate here and switch it with the original subject the original noun 1 the mayor gave the speech it reads better and there's no need for passive voice in this sort of structure okay so moving on to prepositions when you're trying to stay within a specific word limit eliminating grammar constructions with prepositions helps tremendously it counts down it counts it deletes a lot of the words if you can delete the little prepositions that occur in your manuscripts so that's the biggest issue with them is they create wordiness so often stronger and more succinctly these phrasal verbs these verbal phrases that incorporate prepositions so let's see what happens this sentence he got to the finish line not only is it elementary got to you actually have more words he reached the finish line stronger and you may at times need a thesaurus for these it depending on your vocabulary level but this is a pretty common verb so there's no reason why you wouldn't use that stronger verb and replace these two got to with reached it's much more professional he made a decision about what he will do next year he decided what he will do next year you only need one verb right ok here we have the genitive or the approval of the Food and Drug Administration was received yesterday who's your agent the Food and Drug Administration is the agent so let's make it active and get rid of the of the Food and Drug Administration's approval was received yesterday so using that possessive possessive case is another way to get rid of the that pronoun all right sorry the preposition the studies were conducted at Mac's laboratories in Chicago the studies were conducted at Chicago's Mac's laboratories so you've kept the passive tense the passive voice but you've eliminated the preposition again so I want to see if you can look at these and make a suggestion it might be difficult there's a few ways to do it but what do you think here's the original the aim of our research was to assess the correlation between variable a and DNA replication rates does anybody want to try for a revision what's that you can say loud okay let's see our research aimed oh I want to give him a round of applause okay perfect our research aimed to assess how variable a affects DNA replication rates it's stronger right you just you can tell where all the important parts are and that's in that sentence to get back to you we are looking back on what was done to figure out what we can do moving forward this looks like an exercise and how to use prepositions annoyingly how can we change it okay use the bigger the stronger verb we are examining the past to determine how we should proceed it's tighter it uses far fewer words and less prepositions as well last I want to look at nominalizations these are very similar actually we've seen some examples this is a fancy word for using nouns that were formed from verbs we want fewer nominalizations it is clunky and it takes up space so as I said a nominalization is what occurs when you change a verb into a noun had a meaningless verb to it what is meaningless it's a verb that you see all the time that does nothing to help the main verb Joe will conduct research on the impact of the recent drought on local wildlife I'm sure we've all written these in our manuscripts several hundred times conducting research why do we need conduct it's meaningless Joe will research the recent droughts impact on local wildlife the board will make a decision next week about whether to accept accept you next week the board will decide next week whether to accept you right so make make a decision decide is stronger a decision is nominal eyes decide is the verb from which its nominal eyes use the verb instead here's another way to change the nominalization when the nominalization is the subject of a passive voice identify the true subject and convert the nominalization to a verb the approval of the plan was given by the committee yesterday much much leaner and cleaner the committee approved the plan yesterday we see these I wouldn't be giving you examples if if these weren't very common writing clunky clunky style that we see when we edit manuscripts their interpretation of the implementation of already I'm lost right if a journal reviewer is reading this they probably don't want to want to finish reading it their interpretation of the implementation of the Institute's program was insightful they insightfully interpreted how the Institute implemented its program you can change insightful to in an adverb and eliminate these of first was their introduction of their analysis of dreams by the trauma patients where's the action focus on the action what did they do first they introduced how they analyzed the trauma patients dreams I think all of us can agree which which one is easier to read of the two ok I want to give you just a couple more examples and see if you can see if you can work them out for yourself and maybe shout shout out how you think these should be result revised they reach the conclusion that we should run a new cohort study this what's that altogether yeah good so even though you you might you know this when you're shown the structure and shown how to change it uh uh when you're in the writing process you might still have the habit of make a conclusion so when you're editing is when you can really focus on how you have these extra words you can really change the style and the grammar issues when you're editing the undertaking of building the new company was complicated by their lack of experience there's a few ways to do it so I won't ask you to shout it but they lacked experience which complicated how they built the new company or they're inexperienced complicated how they built the new company you have a straight subject verb predicate okay that is my presentation I want at today we've looked at a lot of ways at which authors can improve their manuscripts and I really hope I've impressed upon you the importance of you as an author creating a polished manuscript and if you're in the market for a reputable editing service who can after you're done self editing can provide editing services please check out our company or advice we have hundreds of well qualified experienced editors in various academic fields and that includes academic editing is one of our services we do have pamphlets in the back somewhere back there if you're interested feel free to take one thank you very much

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Keywords: how to write a research paper, common mistakes, manuscript, science journal, how to submit a research paper, wordvice, editing a research paper, how to write an abstract, title, results, discussion, grammar mistakes, research paper, writing an abstract, abstract, editing, how to improve research writing, improving writing research paper, ways to improve research writing, improving research writing for publication

Id: V0P_UVPCni4

Length: 48min 19sec (2899 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018