Here’s an academic sentence from a paper draft in the social sciences:
- “My measure of occupation-specific skills builds on the task-specific skill framework to incorporate the transfer of skills across occupations based on a measure of occupational similarity in job tasks (see the methodological appendix for the creation of this measure).”
The sentence has some jargon, sure. But its structure is what trips a reader up.
My measure…builds on…to incorporate…based on…in…..
Even if all its phrases and clauses were already clearly defined (or were discipline-standard), the sentence is too long and complex. It is trying to do too much work. Several short sentences would spread that work out, assigning each sentence a more manageable task. Let’s give it the Writing is Thinking, short sentence treatment.
What is the sentence saying? Here is my first revision:
- I created a novel measure for occupation-specific skills, based on a task-specific skill framework. My new occupation-level measure takes into account the transfer of skills across occupations, unlike task-specific measures. To create this measure, I used a variable for occupational similarity in job tasks. (See my methodological appendix for the full details).
In this case, I got three distinct sentences out of the original long one. I added a subject who acts (“I”). I gave that subject some actions with simple clear verbs. Even if a non-expert reader does not understand the sentence’s technical terms, such as “occupation-specific” and “task-specific,” the three new sentences have a legible structure that clarifies the relationship between the technical concepts.
I created…based on… It takes into account…unlike… To create it I used...
As an editor, I can typically propose such structural changes without consulting the author first, if I can use the context and subject as clues to what the author means (though of course, I always pass it back to the author to determine if my change is in fact what they were trying to say).
And in this case, the author of the sentence saw my revisions and immediately realized: “That is not what I meant to say.” He saw how a careful reader had to work to interpret his sentence, and he was able to take my feedback and revise his sentence again. The author recognized that he was making a comparison in his original sentence, between occupation-specific and task-specific, but he had not explained or developed that comparison. He went back to do more thinking, to revise the passage to make the comparison clear.
Using his understanding of the topic and my feedback about using shorter, clearer sentences, we wrote:
- I created a novel measure of occupational experience. My measure follows the task-specific framework and takes into account the transfer of skills across occupations. But my measure uses the movement of workers from one occupation to another to define occupational similarity. (The traditional way to define occupational similarity is based on an expert observing the skills performed on a job and creating an index of occupational skills). My measure is superior because it captures the context of skill transferral–for example, when a taxi driver becomes a taxi dispatcher. The task-based framework defines taxi driver and dispatcher as dissimilar occupations because the tasks of each position don’t have much overlap. My measure captures the fact that they depend on similar skills and knowledge since workers do frequently move between the two jobs.
The author discovered that slowing down and clarifying his ideas meant that he had to write more. Our revision is significantly longer than his original sentence, and he did not have the space to add length here. So he took another stab at distilling the ideas in this paragraph into one sentence. He wrote:
- I created a novel measure of occupational experience, which is based on the task-specific skills framework but is superior to its traditional measure. (For more details about this measure, see my methodological appendix.)
When we settled on this sentence, he told me, “That is what I meant to say in the first place”
“That is what I meant to say in the first place.”