Writing for Greater Impact: How to Improve Readability

Your readers, that include researchers like yourself, have a lot on their plate. They want to read and understand academic articles quickly. However, most of them are fitting this task in around heavy workloads in the lab or office, which is far from ideal when it comes to absorbing and understanding scientific ideas.

So it’s down to you to help them. Always put your audience first - make sure you communicate your ideas effectively so they can understand and absorb your work as easily as possible.

In this post we’re sharing further insights from Nature Portfolio’s expert trainer Dr Jeffrey Robens, on how to improve the readability of your writing for your readers. We’ll be discussing a number of useful concepts and tips on how to write well, and what to avoid.

Active voice

Traditionally, the passive voice was considered a more formal and objective writing style for academics. But times have changed and most journals now recommend the active voice. 

According to Nature, “Nature journals prefer authors to write in the active voice as experience has shown that readers find concepts and results to be conveyed more clearly if written directly.” Many current writing style guides across a range of disciplines also recommend using the active voice, such as the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and American Chemical Society.

Why use the active voice? Quite simply, it’s easier to understand. Research has shown that reading sentences in the passive actually uses more brain activity than in the active. So, to improve readability, use the active voice more often. 

However, the passive can be useful in some cases. Here are four situations where it’s actually recommended:

• Avoiding repetition. This can make your work boring and your readers will likely stop reading as a result. So, by using some passive voice for variety, your article will be a more interesting read.
• Unclear subjects. A good example is correlational results: “LDL cholesterol was decreased among participants who consumed a Mediterranean diet.” This is simply a correlation and the cause of the decrease could be related to aspects of the participant’s lifestyle other than diet. By using the passive, you can avoid stating what caused it.
• The Methods section. When you want to emphasize the technique that was performed rather than the investigator who performed it, use the passive. For example, “Atomic force microscopy was performed using…"
• Maintaining logical flow. Linking the stress position (beginning) of one sentence with the topic position (end) of the next is important for logical flow. The passive can help with this, for example:

“The reduced catalytic activity was likely due to the reaction being conducted in an aqueous environment. Evaluating additional solvents to improve this activity is currently being investigated.”

A general rule is to keep a balance between the active (75%) and passive (25%) voices to improve readability.

Strong verbs

Another way to improve readability in your writing is to use more strong verbs. These are specific, descriptive and evocative and will make your article more interesting to read. However, academics sometimes nominalize these verbs (using nouns instead), as in these examples:

You may ask what’s wrong with using nominalizations? Three things: they’re less direct, they make sentences longer, and they’re boring to read. In fact, they’re called zombie nouns because they suck out all the life out of your writing and kill your readers’ interest. Here’s an example:

“We performed an investigation to determine if TiO₂  surface modification led to an improvement in catalytic efficiency and resulted in a reduction in cost.”

Compare this with:

“We investigated if TiO2 surface modification improved catalytic activity and reduced cost.”

You can communicate the same idea more directly and concisely with strong verbs, using half the words. So, watch out for nominalizations in your writing, and use strong verbs instead.

Avoid complex words

“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” Albert Einstein

Many non-native English speakers use complex words to make their writing look more impressive. Don’t do this! Your manuscript is being judged on its academic merit, not its broad vocabulary. Academic ideas are already complex, so you need to communicate them simply otherwise readers may not understand.

“Contributions should be written clearly and simply so that they are accessible to readers in other disciplines and to readers for whom English is not their first language.” Nature

Here’s an example:

“We interrogated the participants upon completion to ascertain the efficaciousness of the program”

Heavy going, right? How about this instead:

“We questioned the participants upon completion to determine the success of the program.”

It means the same thing, but it’s clearer and easier to understand.

Conciseness

In academic writing, conciseness is crucial to ensure your readers can easily grasp your complex ideas without feeling overwhelmed. Cognitive load theory¹ has established that —not surprisingly — there is a limit to how much new information the human mind can process at one time. If you try to give your readers too much information at once, they will get confused. If people get confused when trying to understand your article, they will likely stop reading. 

This is why conciseness is so important in academic writing. Your ideas are complex; therefore, feed them to your reader one small spoon at a time. 

There are two useful tips to keep your sentences short:

1. Communicate only one idea per sentence. If you do this, most of your sentences will be an appropriate length.
2. Avoid unnecessary words. Unnecessary words are those that do not add value to the meaning of the sentence. Can you delete any words without changing the meaning of the sentence? If so, they are not necessary. 

Some common phrases that are not necessary but often used in academic writing, include: ‘it is well known that’, ‘as a matter of fact’, and ‘it is worth mentioning that’. All these phrases can be deleted without affecting the meaning of the sentence. There are also long phrases that can be replaced by single words as well. For example, ‘that is another reason why’ can be replaced with ‘therefore’, ‘despite the fact that’ can be changed to ‘although’, and ‘it is interesting to note that’ can be simply replaced with ‘interestingly’ or ‘notably’.  

You can test the length of your sentences by reading them aloud. Most people cannot read a sentence with more than 20 words in one breath. So, if you have to take a breath while reading a sentence, it is probably too long. 

The same principle applies to paragraphs as well. Keep your paragraphs focused on one idea and keep them short – usually four or five sentences is enough.

Specificity

To ensure that your readers know exactly what you are trying to say, it is important to avoid ambiguity. Your readers come from diverse backgrounds and may not have the same information or knowledge as you do. 

Although the ideas in your head are very clear, they can be ambiguous to your readers. When that happens, they will get confused and stop reading your article. 

So be sure to avoid ambiguous pronouns such as this’, that’, these’, etc. If you have more than one noun in the preceding sentence, readers will have to guess what ‘this’ refers to. You should never make your readers work harder than necessary to understand your ideas. 

“EGFR phosphorylation resulted in the recruitment and phosphorylation of c-Src. This phosphorylation was dependent on…” What does ‘This phosphorylation’ refer to? EGFR or c-Src? The author knows because it is their result, but readers will now have to guess. In this case, it would be clearer to write “The phosphorylation of c-SRC was dependent on…” instead. Authors overuse pronouns because they worry too much about repetition. Repetition should be avoided if possible, but never at the expense of clarity. In this example, repetition is necessary.

You should also avoid qualitative words such as ‘some’, ‘few’, or ‘many’. What is ‘few’ to the author may seem like ‘many’ to the reader. Never assume the readers have the same ideas as you and be quantitative when possible.  

Lastly, avoid subjective words, such as ‘interestingly’, ‘surprisingly’, or ‘strikingly’. “Interestingly, we noticed that…”. What is interesting to you may not be interesting to your readers. Academic writing is meant to be objective, not subjective. Let your readers make up their own minds what is interesting about your findings.

Signposting

When your readers are starting on their adventure through your story, they need clear guidance to understand where you are taking them. If they become confused along the way, they will likely stop reading. Therefore, to be an effective writer, you need to be an effective guide. Giving your readers clues or signs as to where you are taking them is called signposting, and there are a number of ways to do this. 

The first and simplest way is to use linking words. Below, you will find a table of some useful linking words that can be used to guide readers from one idea to another. When readers know what to expect next, they can more quickly understand the next idea.  

However (here is my signpost letting you know the next idea contrasts with the one in the previous paragraph), these linking words can make your writing boring; therefore, they are more like last resorts rather than first options and should be used sparingly. 

A more useful way to guide your readers is to use sentence structure instead. Gopen and Swan² published an article called the Science of Scientific Writing in 1990, which is still an excellent resource for any writer wanting to improve their clarity. One of my favorite concepts from this article was the important role of the topic and stress positions in a sentence. 

The topic position is the first part of the sentence that should introduce the single idea being discussed. Similar to how a topic sentence should introduce the topic of the paragraph to the reader as well. By providing this information in the beginning, the reader knows what to expect in the remainder of the sentence. 

The stress position is the end of the sentence and plays two important roles for the reader. First, it emphasizes what is important about the idea. For example, if I ask you to determine which sentence suggests I will buy you dinner, which would you choose, sentence 1 or 2?

1. I would like to buy you dinner, but my budget is tight.
2. My budget is tight, but I would like to buy you dinner.

Because readers focus on the end of the sentence (i.e., the stress position) to determine what is important, most would agree that sentence 2 suggests you will get a free meal. You should use the same writing technique in your papers when you want to emphasize what is important about your idea. 

But the stress position is also useful for signposting as well. Let’s look at the following two sentences.

“TiO₂ surface modification of the scaffold increased catalytic efficiency. This efficiency was prominent early in the reaction but decreased over time.”

In the first sentence, ‘increased catalytic efficiency’ is the stress position. It is emphasizing what was important about the surface modification. Additionally, it is being used for signposting as well. Before we even read the next sentence, we can assume that the next idea will be about this increased efficiency. And it is. In this case, we do not need to rely on linking words to guide our readers. Efficient sentence structure using both topic and stress positions is sufficient.

There are many ways you can improve the readability of your writing. If you follow these, you’ll be able to make your ideas understood and maximize their impact in the field.

Building on the ideas in this post, Nature Masterclasses offer further advice and training including Writing a Research Paper: 2nd Edition, which introduces the power of narrative tools and the principles of scientific writing. Complementing this, Publishing a Research Paper: 2nd Edition (published November 2024) navigates the editorial and publishing process, with a focus on how to submit your research paper. Our live workshop Getting Published: Effectively Communicating Your Research provides insights and strategies to help researchers increase their chances of publication and maximise the impact of their research.

Dr Jeffrey Robens is Head of Community Engagement at Nature Portfolio and conducts training workshops worldwide to help researchers improve their publication quality and impact. With 20 years’ experience in academia, he has published prolifically and received numerous awards.

<sup>1. _{Sweller J. Cognitive Science. 1988; 12: 257–285.}
2. _{Gopen G and Swan J. American Scientist. 1990; 78: 550–558.}</sup>