Editing services by Heather Wallace, PhD
Academic sentences often try to cram the work of multiple sentences into one complex sentence. By identifying the core of a sentence, we can decide what work each sentences should do–and what work should be delegated to another sentence.
You’d like to think your education has carried you well past short sentences. But you’ve been delivered into a wilderness of false assumptions and bad habits, A desert of jargon and weak constructions, a land of linguistic barbarism,* A place
In this Writing is Thinking sentence makeover, I highlight the verbs that get lost in a complex sentence with an em-dash clause. This sentence appears in book of philosophy from Columbia University Press. The author writes: The decision not
In this Writing is Thinking sentence makeover, I tackle a jargon-filled sentence of literary criticism, published in a Bloomsbury Academic anthology. The author writes: The comestible sensations that precede both the achieved reminiscence and its inherent condition of emotional repose
In today’s Writing is Thinking, short-sentence makeover, we look at a sentence from religion and philosophy, published in a MIT Press book. The author writes: The interpretation according to which enlightenment/wisdom and virtue/goodness and meditation/mindfulness are the ultimate end is
I love short sentences, and I work hard to convince academic writers to use them. But that is no reason to reject all the long ones. Some sentences are so long as to be awe-inspiring, so drawn out as to
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
The Writing is Thinking approach starts with short sentences. Experimenting with short sentences is the first lesson in Verlyn Klinkenborg’s brilliant writing book Several Short Sentences about Writing. Klinkenborg writes: There’s nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences.But
Welcome to the blog of Writing is Thinking. The most important content you’ll find here is sample edits of academic sentences (and occasionally paragraphs). See in practice what it looks like to do a Klinkenborg-style breakdown of long, complex sentences