The literary scholars Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas have identified the stance that our best essayists and writers implicitly adopt, and that is a combination of vision and conversation. When you write you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.

That may sound obvious. But it’s amazing how many of the bad habits of academese and legalese and so on come from flouting that model. Bad writers don’t point to something in the world but are self-conscious about not seeming naïve about the pitfalls of their own enterprise. Their goal is not to show something to the reader but to prove that they are not a bad lawyer or a bad scientist or a bad academic. And so bad writing is cluttered with apologies and hedges and “somewhats” and reviews of the past activity of people in the same line of work as the writer, as opposed to concentrating on something in the world that the writer is trying to get someone else to see with their own eyes.

…Another bit of psychology that can make anyone a better writer is to be aware of a phenomenon sometimes called The Curse of Knowledge. It goes by many names, and many psychologists have rediscovered versions of it, including defective Theory of Mind, egocentrism, hindsight bias, and false consensus. They’re all versions of an infirmity afflicting every member of our species, namely that it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know something that you do know.

…We as writers often use technical terms, abbreviations, assumptions about typical experimental methods, assumptions about what questions we ask in our research, that our readers have no way of knowing because they haven’t been through the same training that we have. Overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer.

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In this Inside Higher Ed article, Nate Kreuter gives thoughtful advice to academic writers about how to curate their physical and social writing environments to enhance productivity.

Writing is an inherently social activity — we write for others — that we most often undertake in solitude. This is one of writing’s great contradictions. We write for an audience, even if that audience is a private note to our future selves. Academic writing, though, whether it is scholarly writing or the functional writing of service obligations that keeps the university running, is always intended for far less abstract audiences. This writing too, is most often undertaken in isolation, at least initially. For this reason, not only the physical environment where we write matters, but also the social environment within which we write.

The way to relax an examiner is to feature a sentence in the first paragraph of a PhD abstract that begins: “My original contribution to knowledge is…” If students cannot compress their argument and research findings into a single statement, then it can signify flabbiness in their method, theory or structure. It is an awful moment for examiners when they – desperately – try to find an original contribution to knowledge through a shapeless methods chapter or loose literature review. If examiners cannot pinpoint the original contribution, they have no choice but to award the script an MPhil…The key is to make it easy for examiners.

“How Not to Write a Ph.D. Thesis” by Tara Brabazon (Professor of Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia) offers a doctoral advisor’s inside look into what makes a doctoral thesis successful–or not. Many of the insights are transferable across fields, including the signal importance of the bibliography. (Times Higher Education, 28 January 2010).