The power of a good structure

I have been giving writing support to professionals, academics, and post-graduate students across multiple disciplines for a long time. For many of them, English is not their mother tongue. It is a tough, competitive environment and to advance – either to the next level through examinations, or by getting their work published – they need to produce intelligible and coherent texts. I think it must be extraordinarily difficult to write sense in an academic register in a language that is not your own, no matter how well you speak it. (I speak and read Spanish and French fairly fluently, but I don’t think I would be able to put together a convincing academic argument in either language.) When I have heard some students talking about their plans and ideas, I have often thought: “Well I can see that you are very clever and capable, but I think your writing is going to let you down because your language is just not good enough.”

And I have so often been proved wrong.

Using quite unsophisticated language, sometimes full of mistakes, many of my mentees have made it by producing well-structured pieces of work. The introduction tells you what to expect, the body does what was promised in the introduction, and they have arranged their ideas well, used effective organizing principles, and shown that they understand the purpose of the paragraph. The argument emerges in an unbroken thread. The conclusion wraps it all up, and there is no padding.

This can be a bit formulaic and linguistic errors may jar and create a few bumps. But the underlying soundness makes for a reasonably smooth journey for the reader, because the connective tissue and the most important signposts are there.

Compare this to another approach: grammatically perfect error-free sentences with more sophisticated language – looking good on the face of it – but placed in a clump of similar-seeming sentences, which are paragraphs only because they are separated from other clumps of sentences by a bigger space. In fact, they are a jumble of ideas with random beginnings and endings, and the reading experiences is as frustrating and exhausting as untangling a very knotted ball of wall.

Of course, it isn’t as binary as this. When assessing academic and technical writing, we are, of course, talking about a spectrum of conceptual and linguistic strengths and weaknesses.

But I make the point to encourage writers working with complex ideas to err on the side of logical sequencing over linguistic sophistry.