Practical Tips for Writers: Word Choice

As a follow-up to the summer series on writing, this post is the third in a series providing technical advice on issues that graduate students (and others) run into in the revision stage. I’ll address problems I commonly see in drafts of dissertations and theses. For each item covered in the series, it’s important to keep in mind the three guiding principles for writers: genre, process, and audience. 

Genre: Most of the writing I work with follows APA or MLA style guidelines. Additionally, most of my writing students are at American institutions and follow those norms for writing. If your field requires a different style or if you are writing in a different academic context, always defer to that.  

Process: In the first stages of writing, trying to make each sentence perfect will only slow you down. The tips in this series are directed at the revision stage.   

Audience: The goal of writing is for your argument to be clear to your reader. Conventions like punctuation and table construction help guide your reader smoothly through your argument.  Sometimes, for clarity’s sake, you might choose to break a rule. That’s okay – these are conventions, not the first table of the Law. Just remember the goal, and make sure that when you depart from convention, it’s on purpose and for the right reason. (Laziness is rarely the right reason.) 

Why Is Word Choice Important?

“The difference,” famously wrote Mark Twain, “between the almost right word and the right word . . . ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” Twain, of course, was a humorist and writer of fiction. He was also riffing off his friend and fellow humorist, Josh Billings.  But the words apply to all writing, not just humor or fiction. Whether you are writing an email, a grocery list, a poem, or a master’s thesis, words are your medium. What isn’t communicated through your words, isn’t communicated at all.

Here’s an example. In our house, my husband often does the grocery shopping, but I always make the list. If I write garlic (meaning bulbs) and he comes home with pickled minced garlic, the fact that I don’t have what I need to make garlicky roasted potatoes is no one’s fault but my own.

Words matter in academic writing, too. As much alike as “quantitative” and “qualitative” look and sound, we can all imagine what kind of trouble someone could get into being sloppy with their meaning. And making a “casual” comparison is quite different from making a “causal” comparison.

Less technical words can cause problems, too. In fact, a “technical” word, which has a specific and precise meaning, may be quite different from a “technological” word—which might refer to my laptop or digital conferencing platform. Is the school “servicing” students? Not unless the students are cars in need of maintenance. And a “formal” supervisor probably has more authority than a “former” supervisor. You may scoff and insist you would never make such errors—but be careful. In a document of 50,000+ words, it’s surprising how easy it is to accidentally refer to “congenital” morality, which might be a bit different from “conventional” morality.

Most of the examples in the previous paragraph are minor, more like typos than actual word choice problems. But they illustrate the confusion that choosing a word that is imprecise—or simply wrong—can cause. The rest of this post will provide some guidance for choosing the right word.

Choose Words that Are Specific and Accurate 

My miscommunication about garlic is an example of using language that is too vague. A good guideline for academic writing is to look for words that create a picture in your reader’s mind. Specific terms such as “high school” or “laboratory” are better than the more general “institution.”

Not only is specificity important to keep your readers interested and help them understand what you are writing about, but it’s also part of what makes your study generalizable or transferable. If someone has a clear picture of the context and content of your work, they can replicate the study (if that’s important in your field) or understand how your findings might apply in their own context (if that’s the measure used in your academic specialty).

Of course, you will often want to use a more general term, just to avoid too much repetition. It’s fine to swap around “X State University,” “college,” and “institution” to add variety—just make sure your reader always knows what you are talking about.

Choose the Appropriate Level of Language

Most students writing academic papers understand that their language should not be too casual. Your methodology section is probably not going to include a sentence like, “So, I pulled together some kids and shot them an email with a survey thing . . ..” The opposite problem is more common. In an effort to sound “smart,” many of us have a tendency to throw in the longest and most flowery version of a word. So “use” becomes “utilize”; “intention” becomes “intentionality”; “teach” becomes “indoctrinate.” In some cases (like the first two), the fancier words just add unnecessary weight. In other cases (like the last one), they change the meaning of the sentence.

The right level of language for a thesis or dissertation is in the professional register. Choose the word that most clearly, directly, and simply says what you want to say. “Smart” in graduate school is solid research, not elevated language.

Limit Jargon and Acronyms

Jargon is the specific language of a particular discipline. Academic writing is almost always done in a particular discipline. It is therefore not only impossible, but also inadvisable, to completely eschew jargon. Many of the students I work with are in education, so terms like “noncognitive,” “trauma-informed,” “Maslow’s hierarchy,” “Bloom’s taxonomy,” “third-semester retention,” and “satisfactory academic progress” abound. Using the jargon of a discipline can be a sign that you are an insider, and a little bit of that can augment your credibility. But make sure you don’t assume that your reader knows what all the words mean—or that words always mean the same thing regardless of context. That’s what it means to “conceptualize,” you explain how you will be using terms, to make sure you and your reader have a shared understanding.

Acronyms and other abbreviations are useful because they save space. They can, however, also make reading more difficult. The sentence: “I didn’t see the CFP from AERA in time to get approval from the IRB for my study of CRT for URM in STEM” requires quite a bit of deciphering. Consider how many acronyms you really need for your genre and audience.

The other thing to remember about abbreviations is that once you use those letters, you need to stick with them. In APA at least, there’s no switching back and forth from Stages of Concern to SOC. When you commit, you commit.

It might be tempting to try to get your words right by asking ChatGPT or another generative AI tool to edit your writing for word choice. I would advise against this. In my experience, ChatGPT may help your language sound smoother, but it also makes it boring. The way that ChatGPT works means that its sentences tend to sound similar to everything ever written before. More importantly, a machine doesn’t know what you mean, so trusting it to choose the most precise word is risky. Yes, you want your writing to sound professional, but you also want it to sound like a person. And the person you want it to sound like is you.

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