But some transitions ( e.g., indeed, then, furthermore) can be deleted with ease. Transitions can help maintain the flow of your writing-and make your reader’s job easy. Passive: The samples were collected by the researcher.Īctive: The researcher collected the samples. And active voice makes your writing clearer and more compelling, helping you tell a powerful story. Revised: We studied whether using the drug would help improve health.Īctive voice uses less words than passive voice. Original: We investigated whether utilizing the drug would facilitate improvements in health. Instead of investigate, facilitate, or utilize, simply use study, help, or use. Resist the temptation to use long words where short ones will do. Revised: The treatment lasted for four days, and the drug improved the health of patients. Original: The entire treatment lasted for four days, and the drug greatly improved the health of patients. Omit unnecessary adverbs and adjectives to make your writing stronger and more concise. Most adverbs and adjectives weaken strong verbs and nouns, which weaken the power of your writing. Remove Adverbs and AdjectivesĪdverbs modify verbs, and adjectives modify nouns. Revised: We found cells expressing the mutated protein migrated across the barrier faster than wild-type cells. Original: We found that cells that express the mutated protein migrate across the barrier faster than wild-type cells. Similarly, the word “that” is often overused in writing and can be deleted with ease. Revised: The clarity of your writing depends on both content and style. Original: The clarity of your writing depends on both the content and the style. You can often omit the word “the” from your text without losing any meaning. Here are a few simple tricks you can use to quickly tighten your text and meet the limit. When you have little time to spare, small changes to your text can add up to the space you need. But good writing is a craft that cannot be mastered within a short window before a deadline. Writing simply is the key to clear and concise content. This process can be even more stressful when you’re under pressure to meet a deadline just hours away. I browsed the web looking for solutions but have not found any.One of the most agonizing parts of academic writing is cutting down your hard-won draft to meet a page, word, or character limit. I remember vaguely a while ago I had the same problem and I fixed it using some simple measure but I can't remember what I did. It might not have anything to do with macros. I know Hangeul (Korean) is written so that it doesn't matter whether words get chopped in half and the original document was written on MS Word for Koreans (and has Korean fonts and things like that).īut the person who sent me the original document is not available and besides can't speak English so I can't ask her about this. Now even though I went into preferences and chose "Warn me before opening macros", the documents open without this opening message. Could that be the problem? Before, I was asked whether I wanted to turn on macros or not, and I chose "No" initially, and then I switched to "Yes". Then with the last four of them, I noticed that the words at the end of the line would get cut in half with one half of the word appearing at the end of one line, and the second half of the word appearing at the beginning of the next line. I edited about eight of them without any problems of formatting. I have to edit about 60 of these documents, each is about four pages. I am doing English editing of a Word document written in Korean and then translated by someone.