Resources

This Bot Cares About Readability

Meet @UnReadBot, a Twitter bot that measures the readability of your preprints. @UnReadBot reminds researchers to care more about the reader and to write more clearly. The bot reads all new bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints, and tweets the least readable of them. We…

Here’s how we fixed this unreadable abstract

Researchers do wonderful work, and it deserves being read. We found this preprint on Promising Preprints, meaning that it is doing very well on Twitter. This is a good sign that the scientific community is excited about the paper. Unfortunately, we found the…

Four books that will transform your academic writing

These four books have changed the way we think about academic writing and helped us develop our editing style. The Elements Of Style, Strunk and White. A classic that every English language writer should know and one that every researcher should keep on…

Hype Adjectives

Overstatements and inflated language are common in modern academic style, but most of them are clutter. The authors use them to impress the reader, but the effective is often the opposite: the reader loses trust in academics’ writing. The authors of a recent…

Six ways to improve your science writing

I am a scientific editor – I help researchers develop and publish their best work. Every day I read drafts full of clutter, complex sentences, and generalities. My authors seem to accept that poor readability is part of the modern academic style. I…