Groundbreaking, not irritating: Choosing words to show research impact
The data have been clear—nearly all academic fields have shown striking increases in the number of studies published each year. In such a crowded environment, it’s more vital than ever to stand out and make the novelty and significance of your research clear. Every time a researcher sits down to craft their covering letter, abstract, or concluding section, phrases like “novel finding,” “paradigm shift,” or “highly promising” come up so often that both writers and editors worry about overusing them. In this post, we look at how common word choices can help or hinder your impact, and how to handle clichés in your writing.
The importance of word choice
When writing on any academic topic, it is vital to be precise, clear, and unambiguous. This is not only to ensure that works remain accessible to a broad audience—which increasingly includes non-native speakers of English—but also to ensure that you get your information across efficiently and with impact. Impactful writing helps the final audience of your paper to understand the main takeaways of your research and gives your submissions the best chance to get past the “gatekeepers,” such as reviewers and journal editors. While it is not the only determiner, your choice of words can affect your publication prospects and, thus, your career. Accordingly, researchers tend to reuse certain phrases across many papers while trying to increase their impact. However, some habits can be detrimental.
Clichéd phrases in scientific writing
A cliché is one of those overused little phrases or ideas that betrays a lack of thought or originality, like how “think outside the box” has become so overused in business that it ironically belongs within that box. Nobody sets out to fill their writing with clichés, but they still creep in. More importantly, many of them can make your writing dull and take away from the impact your research should have. Some examples of clichéd phrases include the following:
“in the current study”
This term comes up often but usually adds little, as it is often used in statements that clearly refer to the study results or methodology.
“in recent years”
This term is vague and can be stretched to almost any time frame. A precise year (“since 2018”) or even a period (“over the last ten years”) will be far clearer.
“it is well known that…”
You can virtually always remove this phrase, as it doesn’t add important knowledge to a declarative statement. To go further, if something is indeed so well known, does it need to be introduced in your paper?
Statements of novelty
“Groundbreaking,” “novel,” “paradigm shift,” “first of its kind,” and much more. We all want to underline the novelty of our research, but overuse of these phrases can seem as if the author is making a claim without necessarily supporting it.
Striking the balance to maximize impact
What is the difference between useful, common phrases and clichés? It comes down to their usage. A word becoming heavily used does not mean that you should stop using it altogether; however, overuse can result in papers or other communications that sound formulaic. Repeatedly describing your findings as “novel” or “promising” can be tiresome. Instead, it’s best not to belabor the point. A single mention would suffice.
Stronger terms like “groundbreaking” or “paradigm shift” can feel like certain predictions of future changes resulting from your work, which goes against the general uncertainty that researchers must embrace. Instead, it is best to provide examples of expected impact your research would have.
More importantly, an inappropriately used cliché term will draw attention to itself. For example, saying that your research “sheds light” on something is fine when something new has been revealed, but it would sound far more of a tiresome cliché if you used it to describe your review.
Set phrases can be good
So far, I have talked about the downsides of using common phrases, but what of the upsides? It might sound strange at first, but committing some often-used phrases to memory can improve your writing. As a teacher, I have had success in coaching students in English writing by teaching them phrases that can help them structure their essays. This helps reduce their cognitive load from thinking up phrases and introduces succinct ways to efficiently transmit information to their audience.
The Academic Phrasebank from the University of Manchester offers many examples of useful phrases in academic writing organized by their usage cases. As well as helping to improve your writing flow, it also offers alternative phrases.
Using AI wisely
The academic community has recently been abuzz with the possibilities—and pitfalls—of using AI in writing. As well as its uses in summarizing, drafting, and proofreading, AI also has promising applications in helping writers find the right words. Microsoft, for one, appears to be going all-in on its Copilot AI system, which includes a range of autocomplete and paraphrasing tools that are steadily being integrated into applications like Microsoft Word. Many other AI-integrated tools now include functionality that provides alternatives for writing that is clichéd or lacking impact.
However, they cannot be relied on blindly. Since AI tools tend to be trained on large corpora of real information, they tend to fall back on many of the clichés that are used organically in real writing. This can result in AI tools generating rather bland, formulaic writing, to say nothing of their tendencies to generate inaccurate information. Overuse of AI tools to paraphrase can also result in so-called tortured phrases, which further underlines the need to use this technology responsibility.
Conclusion
The cliché is not a menace to stamp out of your writing. There are a finite number of suitable phrases available in any language, so appropriate use of very common set idioms or words can facilitate understanding. Words are like ingredients; they can all make the final dish more appealing, but there can be too much of a good thing and some ingredients just don’t go together!
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