Adjectives in research proposals – methinks thou dost protest too much!

Our written world would be much less rich without adjectives. They put the paint on the walls of the picture in our mind’s eye, fill the imagined scene with a diversity of vivid sounds and scents, and give substance to the movie that plays out in our heads when we read or listen to words produced by others. In short, they describe the world, enabling us to sense it by proxy when we don’t sense it directly.

Consider the following sentence from P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Thank You, Jeeves, in which Sir Roderick Glossop describes an alarming encounter with what turns out to be a monkey on the stairs of the Dower House at the fictional Chuffnell Hall:

“I had scarcely reached the stairs when I observed a hideous form. A little, short, broad, bow-legged individual with long arms and a short, wizened face.”

This concise sentence paints for the reader a very clear and distinctive picture of whoever – or indeed whatever – it was that Sir Roderick came across on the stairs. Stripped of its adjectives though, all we’d learn from the sentence is that Sir Roderick encountered an individual that had arms and a face (as indeed the majority of individuals tend to have).

 

‘Good’ adjectives and ‘bad’ adjectives?

For the purposes of this short blog post, I’ll divide adjectives into two broad categories – ‘functional’ and ‘hyperbolic’ – and consider the respective effects of adjectives falling into each category when they’re used in the context of a research proposal.

Functional adjectives can be used to provide helpful or essential information to the reader. In describing this blog post as ‘short’, for example, I’m letting the reader know early on what they can expect – reassuring them that I’m not asking for too much of their time while managing any expectations that it might keep them occupied for the whole of their Penzance to Edinburgh train journey. Okay, ‘short’ is somewhat subjective – my short might be your lengthy when it comes to blog posts, for example – but if you’re one of my regular readers then at least we can establish that this post is a bit less lengthy than my usual monthly ramblings.

But what if I’d said ‘this amazing blog post’? Just by using a different type of adjective, I would have made a highly-subjective claim with which you might very well disagree. And whether you disagreed or not, you’d be well within your rights to want to decide for yourself whether it’s really an amazing post. By using hyperbole – hyping my blog in the hope that I’ll convince you to read it – I may well have annoyed you and put you off it altogether. You’d quite likely now be looking for grounds to refute my highly-questionable ‘amazing’ claim.

I’ve never actually seen anyone claim in writing that their proposed research project is amazing. But I do quite commonly encounter adjectives that may, to a greater or lesser extent, fall into my ‘hyperbolic’ category. Research methods are often described by those who have devised them as ‘novel’, for example, while areas of unmet clinical need are quite commonly held out to be ‘major’. These seemingly-innocuous descriptive words might however prompt the terse reviewer to remark that “I’ll be the judge of that!” Too much hype and not enough evidence to support it may start to raise suspicions that your claims are over-inflated. The title of this post misquotes Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude – Hamlet’s mother – who feels that a character in a play she’s watching is trying too hard to convince, and in doing so is undermining her own credibility. 

In their corporate guide to writing clearly, the National Centre for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has the following to say under the heading ‘Unnecessary adjectives’:

“Adjectives and adverbs (describing words) are subjective, can dilute your meaning and add to your word count.”

In a previous blog post, I made the case – with a little help from Nature journal’s writing-style guide for authors – that clear, plain-language writing such as is advocated by NICE will always improve a research proposal. So, are ‘novel’ and ‘major’ really examples of unnecessary adjectives?

What if I were to write about an illness that has no cure and is suffered by almost 5 million people in the UK and over 450 million people worldwide, causing over 500 premature deaths each week in the UK alone where a new diagnosis is made every two minutes on average? The condition causes complications that lead in the UK to 170 amputations, over 500 heart attacks and almost 700 strokes every week. In these two quite lengthy sentences I have used just two adjectives – both of them functional (‘premature’ and ‘new’). Do I really need to add in words like ‘major’, ‘significant’ and ‘considerable’ to underscore the severity of this public-health problem, or do the facts and figures render such adjectives redundant? If your research is addressing an important problem of some sort, have confidence in the facts as you present them and in your reader’s ability to interpret them. The condition, by the way, is diabetes.

The other example I gave, involving the use of ‘novel’, is perhaps a graver offence in a research proposal. Consider the following sentence: “This novel proposal will fill current gaps in understanding of the infection biology of Salmonella enterica.” The use of ‘novel’ here represents a completely unsubstantiated claim – how do we know the proposal is novel, and in what ways does it fit that description? Better to spell all of this out for the reader, and let them come to their own conclusion that your project includes some exciting new features and approaches. Describe those novel aspects, explaining what makes them different from what has gone before and perhaps pointing out how your own review of the published literature supports this contention. If your claims are accurate and backed up by the facts, then once again they should speak for themselves.

De-cluttering your text

Anyone who ever reads or listens to what I have to say on the subject of bid writing will know that I'm pretty evangelical about the use of plain language – keeping text clear and clean, uncluttered by anything that might detract from the meaning you wish to convey to the reader. Hyperbolic adjectives are a good example of the kind of unnecessary clutter that you should always look to cut out. In her book The Winning Bid: A practical guide to successful bid management, the author Emma Jaques echoes my enthusiasm for plain, uncluttered language:

“Use plain English when creating your text. In reality, this means using short sentences and writing in straightforward language that even the layperson can understand ... Try to avoid jargon, unnecessary adjectives (things like ‘really unique’), padding or fancy words...”

Going all-in on the adjective hate!

If I’ve prompted you look more closely at something you might be doing more or less unconsciously when you write, then you may be interested to take a look at this polemic article, which only half-jokingly makes the case against using adjectives in pretty much all forms of writing. In the article, the author – a professional writer and editor – quotes from Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile and lists six key reasons why manuscripts are badly compromised by heavy reliance on adjectives and adverbs:

• less is more
• assuming that the reader can’t see what you want them to see is to underestimate them
• writers should always make the reader use their imagination
• the most overused adjectives and adverbs are common words that don’t add much
• adjectives and adverbs often don’t pack as much power as you might think
• excessive use makes for unnecessary slow reading

OK, so point four does look rather similar to point five from where I’m sitting. But with the exception of making readers use their imagination – fine for fiction and creative writing, maybe not so helpful in a research proposal, where we don’t want reviewers to do too much in the way of imagining or thinking for themselves – I reckon the above points apply as much to a research-funding bid as they might to a novel.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.

Writing a decent Pathways to impact statement – your step-by-step guide

This month’s post – the first of the new decade – is aimed specifically at anyone preparing a research-funding proposal to one of the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) Research Councils – including Innovate UK and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and also the animals-in-science organisation NC3Rs. It's a rather long post, but my aim is to save you time and anguish in the long run.

With few exceptions, pretty much every research proposal submitted to UKRI will require a mandatory two-page (max) ‘Pathways to impact’ statement that must be uploaded with the rest of the proposal. It’s not uncommon for other funders to ask for something similar too, so the information below may have a degree of relevance beyond just UKRI (and NC3Rs) proposals.

Just what is a Pathways to impact statement anyway?

Let’s first clear something up, and consider what the Pathways to impact statement definitely is not. It is not a description of the impact that you intend for your proposed research. You have an opportunity to summarise this in the ‘Impact summary’ section, where you’ll set out some details of who you expect will benefit and how. And of course the Case for support will also provide an opportunity to discuss the impact potential of the research. Instead, the Pathways to impact statement is a description of what you and your project team can reasonably do to maximise the chances of the intended societal and economic impact actually happening. As such, it’s very much a companion document to the Impact summary.

A colleague of mine likes to use a ‘box of fireworks’ analogy when it comes to discussing research impact. A research project – the work packages and methods to be used – is the box full of fireworks. The beautiful multi-coloured display that those fireworks will produce is the impact. Extending the metaphor, the Pathways to impact statement is a description of how you plan to set the fireworks off in such a way as to ensure they give a spectacular show.

Is anyone really that interested?

Before we dive right in to the nuts and bolts of writing your Pathways document, let’s take a brief aside to consider the importance of this mandatory document. UKRI states that:

“A clearly thought through and acceptable Pathways to Impact is an essential component of a research proposal and a condition of funding. Grants will not be allowed to start until a clearly thought through and acceptable Pathways to Impact statement is received.”

The implication of the above is that it’s theoretically possible for a Research Council panel to award a grant, conditional on the applicant/s having another go at writing their Pathways to impact statement and making a better fist of it second time around. And while it’s not unheard of for this to happen, it would be a very risky strategy indeed to count on the brilliance of your proposed project dazzling the evaluators to such an extent that they turn a blind eye to your half-baked Pathways to impact. In reality, the Pathways document is part of the overall proposal, and reviewers will evaluate it along with the rest of the proposal’s content. They will look at it critically, and may take the view that a weak Pathways statement is indicative of a weak proposal. Sometimes it may effectively be the decider if your proposal is closely tied with a number of others around the ‘fund/don’t fund’ cut-off point. So don’t risk it!

An important section it may be, but many academics seem not to relish writing it. A few regard it with something akin to outright terror. I don’t think it should be so difficult to write though, and I hope that the step-by-step approach outlined below may help to demystify the process.

Step 0: Before you start

As we’ve seen, the Pathways document is not primarily a description of anticipated impact but rather a description of what you’ll do to make sure that impact actually happens and achieves maximum real-world benefit. So it makes absolute sense to write your Impact summary first, so that you completely understand your impact aims and you’re completely clear about what impact you’ll be facilitating. You might be interested in reading a previous blog post about writing the Impact summary section.

Step 0.5: A couple more things to help postpone the moment when you have to start writing

The Research Councils typically specify that the page margins for your Pathways document must be no less than 2cm all round, and that you must use no smaller than 11pt font – usually a sans-serif font like Arial. Line spacing must be no narrower than single. Double-check the funder’s particular requirements in this respect, and then set up your document accordingly. Of course, your margins can be wider if you want, and you can use a bigger font and more generous line spacing if you like. No one says that you can’t make your document look a little bit pretty either. And don’t feel the need to fill two pages just for the sake of it – UKRI says that “it is not expected that all applications will require [two whole pages].”

Step 1: Making an easy start

The blank sheet of paper can impose a curious form of tyranny on the writer, so it’s always nice to be able to pick off some low-hanging fruit in terms of stuff that needs to be written. Start then with the title – I suggest ‘Pathways to impact: [the title of your research proposal]’.  Although it’s part of a larger proposal, the Pathways to impact statement is a standalone document so a title is always helpful. Consider also including the name of the funding scheme and the applicant’s name beneath it. So, for example:

Pathways to impact: Using linked health records to evaluate chronic gum disease as a risk factor for later-life dementia

MRC Researcher-led Grant: PI Dr A. May Dupname

Step 2: A quick introductory recap

Again bearing in mind that this is a standalone document, it’s generally useful to include a short introductory paragraph briefly summarising the research, its importance, and its intended impact in terms of who it will benefit and how. You won’t be covering anything that you haven’t already covered elsewhere in the proposal, so keep it short – I’d suggest probably no more than 6-8 lines. Refer to the Impact summary if necessary rather than repeating too much if its contents.

Still nice and easy so far, hey?

I’ll note here that while UKRI doesn’t think everyone should need two whole pages for their Pathways document, you may find you’ve got so much to say that you’re struggling for space. If this is indeed the case, and you really don’t see any obvious way of shortening, then I guess the output of steps 1 and 2 is an obvious candidate for cutting. It’s all nice to have, but perhaps not absolutely essential.

Step 3: List the targets for your impact activities …

Now we’re getting right into the meat of the Pathways document. Thinking back to your Impact summary (you’ve written that already, right?), you probably worked under two main headings – ‘Who will benefit’ and ‘How will they benefit’. Each beneficiary, stakeholder and user group (and in some cases each individual beneficiary – for example a specific industry partner) that you’ve identified will be a target group for tailored impact activities. They will need to be dealt with in turn within your Pathways to impact statement. You might decide to use sub-headings to demarcate these sections clearly.

Step 4: … and describe your planned impact activities for each target group

Imagine for a moment that you had previously designed a project to benefit dementia patients and their families, plus people at risk of suffering from dementia in the future. There are also potential benefits for the healthcare system that diagnoses and treats dementia; the pharmaceutical industry, which stands to gain from information about new targets in dementia prevention and treatment; and the social-care system that’s responsible for providing ongoing care and support for those who are no longer able to look after themselves. You and your collaborators undertook the project successfully, and you now have a whole load of really-exciting new data about a significant modifiable risk factor for dementia. So what next? One thing’s for sure, if you just sit on your data and do nothing with it then it’s unlikely ever to lead to any meaningful impact for anyone.

It’s vital to make sure that the right information gets communicated in a timely manner, to the right people, and in the right ways, if you’re going to achieve your impact aims. You need some targeted and tailored impact activities.

If for example the key to making a positive difference among people who might one day suffer from dementia is behavioural change, then some clear and understandable messages about that change are needed. And you’ll need to get those messages out to as many people as possible, particularly those in high-risk groups, using whatever means are most effective. This could involve engaging with the mainstream media, and perhaps working with high-profile charitable organisations.

Perhaps there are implications for healthcare policymakers and maybe clinicians themselves – if so then how best to reach these audiences? Once again you’ll need to refine your key messages and the way in which you deliver them, and describe how you’ll reach the people and organisations who matter (often the decision-makers) within those audience groups. This might involve presenting at targeted healthcare-sector conferences, holding bespoke workshops, preparing articles for the specialist media, and maybe exploiting your existing network of influential contacts in these areas.

Maybe the pharmaceutical industry can benefit from your results by developing new treatments – so how best to engage with them? Perhaps you already have links with the industry, or maybe it’s once again a case of targeting appropriate industry publications, conferences and other events.

And so on, generally with at least one feasible and appropriately-designed impact activity planned for each main beneficiary group based clearly on their particular needs, priorities and interests. It’s good to be flexible in your approach to securing impact, and to show that you’re focused on impact outcomes rather than just activities and processes. I’m sure most reviewers will be pleased to know that, should an opportunity to maximise impact present itself, you’ll be sufficiently agile to grasp it.

    

Step 5: Take a quick sanity check

A handful of watch-points to consider at this juncture. First off, you’ll note that nowhere above have I mentioned academic impact and activities designed to achieve it. The Pathways document is just about societal and economic impact, and while it may be legitimate – particularly for a fundamental-science proposal – to acknowledge that achieving effective academic impact in the short term is the key to securing longer term real-world benefit, this is not the place to discuss academic impact and activities designed to achieve it in any sort of detail. Save all this for the ‘Academic beneficiaries’ section.

Secondly, note that Pathways to impact isn’t just about public engagement. It’s often worthwhile to communicate your research to the wider public, particularly if the subject area is likely to garner general interest, and raising public awareness and understanding of science (or other scholarly research) can to some extent be an impact in itself. But it’s not typically the primary impact aim of a research project, so public-engagement activities shouldn’t normally form the core of a Pathways to impact statement. Impact is about achieving real-word change, and not just raising awareness as an end in itself. If you are writing in some public-engagement activities, note that the best ones often adopt a two-way approach rather than being simple unidirectional outreach.

Finally, I cannot over-emphasise the importance of specificity. There’s a world of difference between saying “I will attend conferences and write articles for the specialist media”, and saying “I will submit an abstract to the Alzheimer’s Society Annual Conference (2022) and target specialist media including the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and the British Medical Journal – in all instances due to the extent of their reach among UK and international clinical audiences.” Being specific about the details of your proposed impact activities shows that you’ve thought about them properly and are taking this aspect of your project seriously – and that you haven’t just copied and pasted a line or two of generic text from a previous grant application.

Step 6: Ramp up that specificity!

An overview and description of your proposed impact activities lies at the heart of your Pathways document, and so the more specific detail you can provide about them the better. Where possible and appropriate, consider trying to add some of the following details for each activity to indicate how it will be planned and managed:

• Timetable – when will the activity take place, over what duration, and will it be repeated?
• People involved – which members of your team will be needed, and who else will you need to participate?
• Skills needed – for example if you propose to produce an information video or animation then will you need to outsource some of the specialist tasks?
• Deliverables – will there be tangible outputs from any of your impact activities – for example a suite of information leaflets, or a special report aimed at a particular audience group?
• An assessment of feasibility – it may be possible to give previous examples of similar activities that you have undertaken successfully

Step 7: Back up your claims

Every would-be critic likes to see a claim backed up by evidence and a solid track record, and your proposed impact activities are no exception. If you have some good examples of successful and effective impact activities from previous projects then refer to them, particularly if they’re similar in some way or otherwise of relevance to what you’re proposing to do here. Perhaps you have on-going engagement with relevant stakeholders – once again be sure to mention this, as it will add considerable credibility to your impact claims. Brevity is the key though; the Pathways document is primarily a forward-looking statement of intent rather than a résumé of your past activities.    

Step 8: Cost it all up

Many impact activities come with certain financial costs, and UKRI will expect you to include these in your project’s budget where applicable. There’s no harm in setting out briefly the resources needed for your impact activities and their associated costs in the Pathways document – once again, it demonstrates that you’re thinking through the details and taking the whole thing seriously.

  

Step 9: Explain how you’ll monitor and evaluate your activities

It’s important to keep tabs on whether project tasks are running to schedule and are meeting their objectives. Impact activities are no exception, so it’s good to explain briefly in your Pathways document what milestones and measures you’ll use to evaluate their progress and effectiveness. In the case of an information video, for example, a key milestone might be publication of the completed video on a public-facing website, while a measure of the effectiveness of this impact activity might be the number of downloads or views.

A non-step – don’t do this!

If you’re aiming for a successful outcome it’s often helpful to have an example of what success looks like to refer to. In the case of a Pathways to impact statement this might be one that you put together for a previously-funded project, the same thing from a colleague, or perhaps one of the examples published online by research-impact guru Mark Reed. I would though urge you to be very careful here, and avoid the very-real temptation to take the lazy-person’s approach. A good Pathways document will always be highly project specific, and so previously-successful examples are likely to have only very limited relevance for your own proposal beyond offering a general guide to the approach taken. Even here, beware – I’ve seen funded proposals that had, to my mind, a rather weak Pathways to impact statement that certainly didn’t tick off all of UKRI’s criteria. Okay, so they may have gotten away with it – perhaps the rest of their proposal was absolutely stellar. But I’d steer clear of the temptation to try to shoehorn your own list of stakeholder groups and impact aims into an approach developed specifically for a completely different project. And definitely don’t copy and paste!

But I’m a pure mathematician – there’s no real-world impact that I can reasonably predict!

The renowned mathematician and set theorist W. Hugh Woodin once made the following observation on the subject of impact:

“It’s a losing game to say that one area of mathematics will not have future application … Never make that prediction – you’ll lose!”

I agree, but it doesn’t provide much to work with when it comes to constructing a convincing Pathways to Impact statement. Fortunately, there’s a get-out for those who genuinely cannot link their research to any form of measureable impact outside of academia. While UKRI says that “being able to describe a pathways to impact [sic] will apply for the vast majority of proposals”, they do acknowledge that, exceptionally, this is not the case. They indicate that in this instance the Pathways to impact document should be used to explain why it just isn’t possible to complete this section in the normal manner. If you’re convinced this applies to you (and in my own area of focus, the life sciences, it never should!) then I’d recommend at least writing in some decently creative public-engagement activities to educate and inform the public about your research. And if at all possible, try to make some reasonable general predictions, perhaps based on historical precedent, as to the types of field in which your work might eventually have an impact – for example crypto security.

And that’s it – you’re about done. If you’ve followed each of the above steps reasonably faithfully then you should now have in front of you a passable Pathways to impact statement, ready for polishing and hopefully passing around to collaborators, institutional impact professionals and perhaps your non-academic project partners to critique.

Step 10 – because you just have to have 10 steps…   

Step 10 is optional, and it’s aimed at anyone who’s left still scratching their head. Mark Reed of specialist training company Fast Track Impact has produced a free online ‘Pathway to Impact Builder’ that will guide you through a series of questions and then spit out a draft Pathways statement. It’s not quite the no-effort magic solution that this short description might suggest (come back to me Mark when all I need to do is put in a project title and then press ‘Go’…), but it’s undeniably a neat idea. You can try it here.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. The Fast Track Impact 'flower' logo above is the intellectual property of  the owner and is copyright protected. Edvard Munch's wonderful but very haunting painting The Scream is in the public domain, as by extension are photographs of it. 

Title (mis)deeds?

Just a brief post this month, as befits a look at one of the shortest sections of a research proposal – its title. The title is almost certainly the part of your proposal that will be read first, and it may well be the one single bit of text that’s read the most.

First impressions count

Picture for a moment a tired reviewer, working late into the evening to get through a pile of proposals. They put down the one they’ve just read with a weary shake of the head and reach for yours, scanning the title to get a quick heads-up as to what it’s about. Why should they care enough to read on past the title? It’s a question you should already have asked yourself, and in answering it you hopefully aimed a bit higher than ‘because that’s what they’ve signed up to’.

The title is an opportunity to create a strong first impression, catch the reader’s eye and give them a good flavour of what’s to come. It should inform, intrigue and entice the reader – even the weariest of cynics – and hook them in, making them want to find out more. It sets the scene, predicting the content of the proposal and reflecting its aim, focus and key messages. Its job is to confirm to the reader that yes, this is something they really should be interested in.

This is quite a task for a single short sentence or phrase to accomplish. And it’s made more challenging by the fact that shorter certainly is sweeter when it comes to titles. I’d suggest aiming for a maximum of 20 words, and ideally no more than 15. You might even consider limiting it to ten.

Here’s an example of a proposal title that I think is rather nice. It’s based on something I found on the web:

The role of psychosocial factors in treatment compliance among HIV-positive patients

Okay, it’s 11 words long, not ten or less. But it’s still succinct and punchy, fitting easily onto a single line and containing no flab or waffle. It packs in a lot of good information – we now know exactly what the proposal is about. We know the main group of people that it involves, the specific behaviour of interest, and the variable/s under examination that could affect that behaviour. Contextual cues give a good indication as to the importance of the proposed research. Armed with this knowledge, the reader can very quickly decide whether the proposal is likely to be of interest to them. If it has been submitted to the right funder, the right funding call and/or the appropriate panel, and if it addresses the funder’s guidance, remit and objectives, then it’s reasonable to hope that the answer here will be ‘yes’.

Get the essential information to the front

Even though a good title should only be short, it’s nevertheless well worth trying to front-load it with those words and phrases that work hardest to catch the reader’s attention and spell out exactly what the proposal is all about. Take the following example:

A cluster-randomised pragmatic trial to evaluate the effectiveness of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating non-healing wounds in diabetes

This is perfectly adequate – it does the job. It’s not too long (18 words) and it certainly tells us clearly what the project is about. But I think it could be improved. Specifically, I might point out that we’re fully ten words into the title before we get any clue as to what the research is actually about. And it’s not until right at the end that we discover it’s about diabetic wounds. There’s scope to front-load the title with that information, and perhaps in doing so reduce word count a little. Here’s my effort (11 words in total):

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy in non-healing diabetic wounds: A cluster-randomised pragmatic trial

Proposal acronyms

Sometimes an acronym is conjured up as part of, or as an adjunct to, the proposal title. Some people just love a nice project acronym, and presumably at least some of those people are themselves reviewers. I’m quite partial to a good acronym (or proposal short name) myself, so long as it’s catchy, appropriate to the proposal’s focus and not too obviously forced. So for the above example, we might consider something like the following:

HEALS: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for Effective Amelioration of Long-term and Slow-healing diabetic wounds – A cluster-randomised pragmatic trial

While an acronym certainly isn’t the be-all and end-all of a good proposal title – I daresay no project ever missed out on funding for want of a killer acronym – a decent one provides a strong and easily-recalled identity for the project. Consider this; your proposal will (hopefully) get discussed by a panel or committee, and its members will typically refer to it using a short-hand version of the name. Would you rather they referred to it is as ‘HEALS’, or ‘the one about hyperbaric oxygen treatment’? 

I’m really not keen on acronyms of the ‘AWFUL’ variety though: rAndomly-generated acronyms that alWays Fail to impress because they're only tenUously connected with the proposaL.  And please – the titles I’ve used above are just intended as illustrative examples, so if a pragmatic cluster-randomised trial would not in any way be appropriate in this context then hopefully you’ll accept my sincere apologies and spare me the anguished emails…

Don’t forget the rest of the proposal!

Importantly, while the title (and indeed acronym) may well be the first part of your proposal to get read, it doesn’t need to be the first thing you write. Certainly, don’t get stuck in the name-hunting loop at the expense of getting on with the proposal itself. This can become quite a rabbit hole, and for the procrastinators among us it can prove very tempting to put off the hard work of writing in favour of knocking about some promising titles and acronyms. If necessary, just come up with a working title and re-visit this when the bulk of the writing work is done. Often a good title will emerge organically from the writing process.

Practising what I preach?

And what of the title I’ve chosen for this blog post? Well it’s certainly short, and I think it gives a pretty clear indication of what the post is about. I’ve also sneaked in a pithy little word play, which pleases me at any rate; probably too frivolous for a research proposal, but acceptable in a blog.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

‘Academic’ writing and ‘normal’ writing – really so different?

We write for various different reasons – to educate and inform, to record, to persuade and convince, sometimes to entertain. Above all, we write to communicate. As writers we have a message that we want to pass on to someone else, and as when passing a ball we want to make sure it gets to the recipient safely. Lob the ball two metres over your team-mate’s head and you only have yourself to blame when it bounces out of play. Toss your reader a load of impossible-to-follow gibberish and you cannot expect them to grasp what you’re trying to tell them. I can’t think of many modes of writing to which all this doesn’t apply.

A large part of most academics’ workload involves writing for various purposes, and these outputs mostly fall within the definition of what’s commonly termed ‘academic writing’. For many, the writing style that has come to be associated with academic writing is more or less synonymous with sophisticated and often-arcane prose peppered with recondite terms, highly-technical language, and lengthy multi-part sentences – often ill-structured – whose numerous subordinate clauses introduce and juxtapose several abstruse concepts (see what I’ve done here?). It never opts for a short, simple word if a longer, more high-falutin’ one is available. Why just ‘use’ something, when you could utilise it instead? It’s an exclusive form of writing that confers membership of a club on the relative few who can understand it, and excludes lesser mortals.

Why would you write like that?

I have a theory about how and why this approach to academic writing has come to pass. I think it stems from the fact that most people’s first-ever experience of academic writing is the undergraduate essay. Faced with writing something on a scholarly or technical subject about which we know very little, and aware that our efforts will be judged by intimidatingly-clever experts and rated at least in part on the basis of quantity as well as on quality, we scrabble around desperately for a means of filling five or six pages with prose that’s at least not transparently-obviously utter nonsense. We grasp desperately for the two complementary strategies available to us that seem to offer a solution; verbosity and obfuscation. And before very long we have produced pages of long-winded waffle, sparsely populated with the scant few facts that we have in our possession. It’s neither incisive nor easy to read, but that’s kind of the point – maybe Prof will just throw in the towel and give it the benefit of the doubt!

Assuming the essay scrapes a pass, we’re already well on the way to internalising the notion that clarity of meaning is not central to the discipline of academic writing, and that long-windedness is a winning strategy. We’re reinforced in this by what we see around us – everyone’s at it, so it must be the way forward.

Now I realise that the academic world can be quite protective of its mores and traditions, and I also understand that as a non-academic myself I’m on distinctly spongy ground if I launch unilaterally into a polemic against one of these. I could baldly state my claim that academic writing and plain-language writing (sometimes referred to as plain-English writing) should be synonymous, but my aim when blogging is always to inform and persuade, not to indulge in the sort of controversy-stirring that normally leads to mudslinging on Twitter. I can almost hear the cries of protest – my readers are intelligent and well educated, and they don’t need to be patronised!

So let’s explode the first myth; plain-language writing is not condescending to the reader. Don’t just take that from me – here’s what the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major national funder of health and medical research in the US, has to say on the matter:

“Plain language is grammatically correct language that includes complete sentence structure and accurate word usage. Plain language is not unprofessional writing or a method of ‘dumbing down’ or ‘talking down’ to the reader.”

Lest we’re is any doubt (NIH is American, for example, and we all know they do things a bit differently over there), let’s consider the advice that the University of Leeds Library Service gives on the subject:

“Academic writing is clear, concise, focussed, structured and backed up by evidence. Its purpose is to aid the reader’s understanding. It has a formal tone and style, but it is not complex and does not require the use of long sentences and complicated vocabulary.”

Let’s deconstruct this slightly. They refer to ‘formal tone’, and that’s important. Plain language is always clear but its tone is often neutral, and it certainly doesn’t have to be – indeed often shouldn’t be – chatty. Contractions, for example, like ‘it’s’, ‘you’ll’ and ‘won’t’ are fine in this blog post, but definitely not okay in a journal paper or research proposal (I once saw a grant reviewer complain in their feedback about the single instance of ‘it’s’ that had slipped unnoticed past the final proof read).

And what of the statement that complicated vocabulary is unnecessary? Even though I’m not an academic, I’m not completely naïve here. I understand that academics write challenging stuff about difficult-to-understand topics. What if you’re writing a paper on the role of ryanodine receptors in the sarcoplasmic reticulum membrane, or a research proposal about singlet exciton fission in single-junction solar cells? Well, let me make my own suggestion here; the language used throughout the piece should only ever be as complex as it needs to be. Sure, there’s no easily-accessible synonym available for most technical terms, but don’t make it even harder for the reader by stitching them into long and rambling sentences, and surrounding them with other needlessly-complex words. And accept that while the ‘methodology’ section of the singlet exciton proposal will inevitably be pretty heavy going, the ‘impact’ section should be clear and straightforward.

The laws (well, writing-style rules) of Nature

I cannot think of a more convincing means of promoting the ‘use plain language’ message than to point out that it’s exactly what Nature tells its journal authors to do. Admittedly they don’t actually use the term ‘plain language’ – perhaps that would just be a bridge too far? But their guidance for authors is nevertheless based squarely around the very fundamentals of plain-language writing. Let’s take a look at it.

They start by reminding us that many of their readers will not be native English speakers. The likely degree of heterogeneity within almost any readership in this and other respects is certainly worth keeping in mind. Will non-specialists read your research proposal, for example, and perhaps lay readers too? Might mainstream-media journalists access your journal paper? Nature does go on to acknowledge that their journals are read mostly by professional scientists, and recommends that authors “avoid unnecessary simplification or didactic definitions”. As we saw above, it’s a misconception that either of these is a key feature of plain language, although of course a lay summary does need more by way of simplified ‘explainers’ than the main text will. But Nature also issues the following caveat: “However, many readers are outside the immediate discipline of the author(s), so clarity of expression is needed to achieve the goal of comprehensibility.” The second part of that sentence might seem so obvious as to not need stating, but it’s hard to disagree with.

Next comes another key tenet of plain-language writing – favouring use of the active rather than the passive voice: “Nature journals prefer authors to write in the active voice (‘we performed the experiment...’) as experience has shown that readers find concepts and results to be conveyed more clearly if written directly.” Few would claim that the passive voice should never be used (see what I did there?), but like vodka and profanity it’s best used only in moderation. This Grammarly blog post examines the difference between active and passive voice if you’re interested.

Nature continues: “We have also found that use of several adjectives to qualify one noun in highly technical language can be confusing to readers.” Well it just so happens that use of unnecessary adjectives is very much the antithesis of plain-language writing. Furthermore, “we encourage authors to ‘unpackage’ concepts and to present their findings and conclusions in simply constructed sentences.” Simply-constructed sentences are another fundamental characteristic of plain-language writing.

When it comes to high-falutin’ language, Nature is once again on right board: “Many papers submitted for publication in a Nature journal contain unnecessary technical terminology, unreadable descriptions of the work that has been done…” Plain language is specifically designed to be readable, and once again their guidance espouses some fundamental plain-language principles.

“Our journal subeditors and copyeditors edit the manuscript so that it is grammatically correct, logical, clear and concise. […] Of course, this process is assisted greatly if the authors have written the manuscript in a simple and accessible style…” Well, quite. Statements like this make me feel quite warm inside…

Pretty much every main aspect of plain-language writing gets a look in. “We ask authors to avoid jargon and acronyms where possible” – another key principle ticked off. They end by re-emphasising the importance of “clear and accessible writing”. Nature has in essence unpackaged plain-language writing, and instructed authors to write in plain language without actually using the term itself.

For my own part, I’ve come to realise that if something isn’t written clearly then it often means the writer doesn’t really understand it. As Einstein once said, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” In a research proposal, this is often because the writer is trying to describe and justify a research project that they have yet to plan out properly – they don’t actually know yet exactly what they’ll do, how they’ll do it, who will do what and when it will be done. How can anyone write clearly about something that doesn’t exist yet?

And what of ‘utilise’?

Usage and Abusage, Eric Partridge’s classic reference guide to good use of the English language, is uncompromising on this word’s lack of linguistic merit: “utilise is, 99 times out of 100, much inferior to use; the other one time it is merely inferior.” If ‘utilise’ does have a distinct meaning beyond being a more pretentious alternative to ‘use’, it’s perhaps to describe a situation where something is put to practical and effective use, maybe a use for which that item was not originally intended. For example: ‘the crow utilised an old skewer to retrieve the nut from the hole’. Even here though, ‘used’ would have done the job perfectly well.

So just do it!

It seems then that plain language isn’t just a minor sub-genre or writing style, to be dusted off and employed occasionally for things like lay summaries, press releases and study-participant information sheets. Rather, it’s an overarching set of principles that will benefit pretty much every mode of writing, and should certainly inform our approach to writing things like research proposals, journal papers and REF case studies. In fact, any form of writing where the aim is to convey a message clearly and convincingly to the reader. And you don’t just need to take my word for that.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.