Lesson 17 of 30 · Write it so it gets read

Cut it until it is clear

Reviewers are busy and skeptical, and dense prose reads as muddled thinking even when the science is sound. Clarity is not dumbing down, it is removing the friction between your finding and the reader.

Three moves do most of the work. First, prefer strong active verbs to nominalizations: "we measured" beats "measurements were performed", "X increased Y" beats "an increase in Y was observed". Second, put the actor at the front of the sentence and the action right after it, so the reader is never holding a subject in memory waiting for its verb.

Third, cut every word that does not change the meaning: "in order to" is "to", "due to the fact that" is "because", "a total of 40 patients" is "40 patients". Non-native-English authors are rejected for language reasons roughly 2.5 times as often (Amano, 2023), and much of that penalty is structural clutter and passive construction rather than vocabulary, which is exactly what these three moves address.

Your move

Take one dense paragraph from your draft (or write one about your method) and rewrite it: turn nominalizations into active verbs, put the actor first, and cut every word that earns nothing. Paste the rewrite. If you have no draft yet, rewrite this sentence and extend the habit: "An investigation into the effects of the treatment was conducted."

Why: Language rejections are the most fixable rejections there are, and the fix is three repeatable moves, not better English. Building the habit now compounds across every paragraph you will ever write.

Worked example

"An investigation of the effect of X on Y was performed" becomes "We tested whether X changes Y." The actor comes first, the verb is real instead of a buried noun, and the sentence is half the length. That is the whole move, applied line by line.

The pattern that loses papers here

Cosmetic word-swaps that leave the passive, nominalized structure intact. Deleting "very" and "in order to" feels like editing, but the sentence is still a noun pile the reviewer has to unpack.

Check it against your draft

Every sentence leads with who did what
Nominalizations turned back into verbs (investigation of becomes investigated)
The rewrite is shorter than the original, not just reworded

Quick check

2 questions, to catch the misconceptions this lesson exists to fix.

1.The biggest clarity fix for a non-native English author is usually:
2."An investigation was conducted" is clearer than "We tested whether X lowers Y."

Write your answer and keep it

Reading is free and always will be. An account is what lets you write your own answer to this move, get it read back to you, and keep everything you build as you go.