"Participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation."
"We tested the students in a quiet room."
Which one of the two sentences above is easier to read and process?
Academia is full of bloated sentences—whether by tradition, naïveté, or impostor syndrome—resulting in the well-worn and well-deserved stereotype that academic writing is inaccessible to all but the most erudite scholars. Considering the many hours that scholars spend on careful researching and writing, and the many more hours you spend editing that writing, it is a shame that so much of this writing will float unread down the sewers of the ivory towers. In this presentation, you will learn ways to help bring life into your academic authors' prose based on fundamental principles from linguistics and psychology. Inspiration and current best practices will be drawn from Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing and Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. The presentation will explore the recent "plain language" phenomenon and argue that plain language is usually the better choice, even when the writing is meant for other specialists in the field.