Here, we will discuss some advanced level issues, with an aim to make your academic writing more effective and valuable. For understanding general writing rules kindly refer to "Essential Writing Rules for Non-Natives" section. 

We will take a hands-on approach to understand the essentials of a good academic writing. The best approach I could think of is by pinpointing what not to do, while writing an academic piece. By going through various examples, I will try to give you an idea of the principles, such that they are readily usable for you in your own writing. 

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There are ten major rules which can make your academic writing stand-out with an element of brevity, style and elegance, while at the same time making information more accessible for readers:

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1. Consider Your Audience

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Your target audience is the scientific community regardless of whether you are writing
a dissertation proposal, submitting a grant proposal, or writing a journal article.
Grant reviewers or journal readers do not always have expertise in your proposed area. From strictly reviewers' view-point, while one reviewer may have a specific background in your area, others are assigned based on their expertise with the proposed methodology (e.g., epidemiology), and others are assigned to review the statistical analysis section. 
However, it is reassuring to note that, if your proposal is well written, even a generalist
reviewer will be able to assess (1) whether your goals are clearly stated, (2) whether
your proposal clearly justifies how it extends prior work in the field, (3) what is innovative about your proposal, as well as (4) the impact of your potential findings on the concerned communities.

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2. Keep Acronym use to a minimum

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Academic writers often resort to acronyms as a way to save space. While this is acceptable for commonly accepted acronyms (e.g., MI for myocardial infarction), this practice is discouraged for acronyms that are either not commonly used or, even worse, that are created solely for the purposes of your proposal.
Imagine that you are writing a proposal to evaluate the impact of high-impact physical activity and you find yourself using that term repeatedly. It is still not acceptable
to create a new acronym to save space (e.g., HIPA for high-impact physical activity).
Using such nontraditional or customized acronyms will make your proposal much more difficult for a reviewer to follow—leading to reader frustration. Some proposal writers,
intent on saving space, have tried to get around this tip by including an acronym glossary
as a table near the beginning of their proposal. However, such a glossary either requires the reader to constantly flip pages back and forth to refer to the glossary or page up and
down, thereby impeding the flow of their reading. Anything to make the review process
easier for the reviewer, even at the expense of a slight increase in word count, will pay
off in terms of a happier reviewer who can clearly see the impact of your application.

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3. Avoid using clutter

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Cutting clutter is one of the most important principle which can radically enhance writing quality. This principle can be represented by small rules which are elaborated in these small videos, alongside examples. Here are some common sources of clutter that you should be on a look-out for:

• Dead weight words and phrases

• Empty words and phrases

• Long words or phrases

• Unnecessary jargon and acronyms

• Repetitive words or phrases

• Adverbs

• Superfluous uses of "there are/there is"

• Negative phrases

• Needless Propositions

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4. Use active voice the best you can

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Use of the active voice as opposed to the passive voice is always preferable in scientific
writing. Unfortunately, students often feel tempted to use the passive voice in an attempt,
albeit misguided, to sound more sophisticated. To achieve that, instead, the use of active voice comes off sounding more impressive. The active voice has other advantages: it avoids indirect sentence constructions, which, in addition to being harder to read, also takes up more space. And, as you know, space is vital when writing a scientific piece.
 

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5. Use strong verbs

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Using strong verbs make your writing more understandable while keeping your reader's attention through complex ideas. Verbs are what drive the English language. Verbs make sentences go. They make the sentence lively. They draw the reader in. So you need to focus on writing with verbs. 

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6. Use Transitions to help trace your arguments

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This tip fits under the rubric of being kind to your reader. For example, let’s say that you would like to introduce three related points. In this case, it is helpful to the reader to begin sentences or paragraphs describing these points with such terms as first, second, and third. These terms provide guideposts for your reader, keeping them up to date on your plan and helping them to identify relationships among sections of your proposal. These transitions also have the secondary effect of ensuring that you are internally consistent—ensuring that you do not inadvertently drop one of your arguments. Similarly, the list format also helps to ensure that all your points are relevant to your overall argument as opposed to being extraneous. Other transition phases, aside from a numbered list, include the next example, in a related study, and a counterexample. In summary, these phrases serve the purpose of alerting the reader to the purpose of each paragraph and therefore are kind to the reader/reviewer.

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7. Avoid Professional Jargon

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In the spirit of writing clearly and concisely, one of the keys is to avoid the use of
professional jargon. (Or, if you must include the jargon, at the least you will want to
accompany it with a brief explanation.) Professional jargon refers to use of the terms
such as selection bias, information bias, and confounding as stand-alone terms without
a lay person description. This tip may appear counter-intuitive at first, because
you may feel that such jargon is brief and self-explanatory. However, even for an
audience of experts, simply using these terms without describing the bias scenario
that you are concerned about puts the burden on the reviewer to imagine how the
study under discussion may be facing, for example, recall bias. Therefore, clarifying
your jargon in a direct manner using simple terms will show the reviewers that you
have a clear grasp of the potential limitations that your study faces. Secondarily, by
doing this work for the reviewer, you will be following the principle of being kind to
the reviewer.
For example, imagine you are conducting a study of oral contraceptives and risk
of diabetes.

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8. Avoid using synonyms for recurring words

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The avoidance of synonyms is a key principle to follow as their use is one of the largest
sources of reader/reviewer confusion and ultimately frustration. We are taught in
creative writing courses to find synonyms for terms in order to keep reader interest and
to keep from being repetitive. In contrast, this approach is discouraged in scientific writing.
Given the complexity of the terms and methods used in proposals, the more clear
and simple you can be stylistically, the easier it will be for the reviewer to understand
your proposal and thereby to evaluate its merits.

You probably found yourself reading the original example several times to make
sense of it. Imagine your frustration as a grant reviewer facing a stack of proposals to
read with an impending deadline.
You can see in the original example that several synonyms are used: Athena cohort,
Group 1, and experimental group. Additionally, it is unclear who constitutes the other
group of youngsters. Confusion grows because we don’t know if Group 1 refers to (1)
the Phoenix cohort or (2) the other group of youngsters or (3) represents a third group
that has yet to be defined.
In the improved example, it is now clear that there are only two groups and,
even more importantly, which one is the experimental group and which one is the
control group.

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9. Lookout for confusing grammatical errors

 

These grammatical errors which are prevalent in academic writing are elaborated in the next section.

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10. Use Punctuation effectively and carefully

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Academic writing can be considerably enhanced by the use of the following: dash, colon, semi-colon and parenthesis. Varying sentence structure is an important element of effective piece of writing and these punctuation come in handy. 

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