Control the length before anything else
The single most effective change available to most second-language academic writers is shorter sentences. Long sentences are not more scholarly; they are simply harder to keep grammatical. Each additional clause adds another place for a subject to lose its verb, a pronoun to lose its referent, or a modifier to attach to the wrong noun.
Consider: “Although the results which were obtained from the second experiment, that was conducted in a different laboratory with a larger sample of participants who had not previously taken part, were different, the conclusion remains the same.” The reader has to hold the subject across thirty-five words. Split it: “The second experiment ran in a different laboratory, with a larger sample of new participants. Its results differed, but the conclusion is unchanged.” Two sentences, nothing lost.
Aim for variety rather than uniform shortness. A mix of ten-word and twenty-five-word sentences reads well; a run of forty-word sentences exhausts a reader regardless of who wrote them. When in doubt, break at the point where you would take a breath saying it aloud.
Nominalization: verbs hiding inside nouns
Academic English is full of abstract nouns built from verbs, and writers taught that formality means abstraction use far more of them than published papers do. The pattern turns an action into a thing and then needs a weak verb — make, perform, conduct, result in — to hold the sentence together.
Examples worth recognizing in your own drafts. “An examination of the data was performed” → “We examined the data.” “There is a need for the clarification of these terms” → “These terms need clarification,” or better, “We define these terms below.” “The utilization of this approach led to an improvement in accuracy” → “This approach improved accuracy.” Each rewrite is shorter and names who did what.
Not every nominalization is wrong. Established technical terms — “socialization,” “replication,” “differentiation” — are the correct names for concepts and should stay. The ones to hunt are the ones you created by converting your own verb, which are usually the ones sitting next to “perform,” “conduct,” or “make.”
- “carry out an analysis of” → “analyze”
- “provide an explanation for” → “explain”
- “there was an increase in scores” → “scores increased”
- “make a comparison between” → “compare”
Articles: the traps and the workarounds
Articles are hard for speakers of languages that do not have them, and no short rule covers every case. But most academic article errors fall into a few recognizable situations, and a strategy is more useful than a rule. For general claims about a category, use a plural noun with no article: “Researchers disagree about this,” “Interviews were transcribed.” This is both correct and the normal academic form.
Use “the” when the noun has already been identified for the reader — mentioned before, made specific by a following phrase, or unique in context. “We recruited a sample of graduate students. The sample was drawn from three departments.” The second mention takes “the” because the reader now knows which sample. Similarly, “the effect of temperature on yield” takes “the” because the following phrase pins it down.
Use “a” or “an” to introduce a countable singular for the first time: “We developed a coding scheme.” And remember that uncountable nouns take no article in general statements — “research suggests,” not “a research suggests,” and “evidence indicates,” not “an evidence.” Those two words cause more trouble than the rest combined.
Prepositions follow convention, not logic
Preposition choice is arbitrary and language-specific, which is why translating it from your first language fails reliably. English says “research on migration” but “a study of migration”; “an effect on performance” but “a change in performance”; “consistent with the hypothesis” but “contrary to the hypothesis.” None of these can be derived; they must be collected.
The frequent errors have recognizable shapes. Verbs that take a direct object in English acquire a preposition by analogy — “discuss about the results” should be “discuss the results,” and the same happens with “emphasize,” “mention,” and “address.” Others swap for a near neighbor: “different than” for “differ from,” “depend of” for “depend on,” “in the contrary” for “on the contrary.”
Build your list from your own reading. When you find a phrase in a paper you would not have produced yourself, write it down with the sentence around it. Fifty entries collected from your own field will cover most of what you write, and the list keeps working long after any grammar rule has faded.
Fix reference before you fix grammar
Beyond grammar, the most damaging clarity problem is unclear reference — pronouns and demonstratives with no unambiguous antecedent. “This shows that the model is inadequate” leaves the reader to guess what “this” names: the result, the mismatch, the whole analysis. Adding a noun solves it: “This mismatch shows that the model is inadequate.”
Make it a rule that “this,” “that,” “these,” and “those” always carry a noun after them in your academic writing. It costs one word and removes an entire class of ambiguity. Native speakers benefit from the same rule; it simply matters more when other cues in the sentence are already carrying strain.
The related check is “it” at the start of a sentence. If “it” refers to something two sentences back, name the thing instead. Reference errors survive proofreading better than grammar errors do, because a reader can usually repair the grammar and cannot repair a reference only you can resolve.
