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As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the command “Omit needless words!” originates from the book “The Elements of Style”. This concept of removing superfluous words often comes as a surprise to some students. Many share the conviction that high-class scientific writing requires numerous complicated words. The most productive step for such students on the path to writing more concisely is to abandon this belief.

Recognising and removing unnecessary words is, like many skills in writing, a question of practice. Several exercises in this book provide that practice and enable you to build up the experience to judge whether a word, a phrase, a sentence or a paragraph may be superfluous. As an example, examine the following two sentences.

“The fact that many young scientists need a significant amount of practice to improve their written communication skills is a case in point. It can be seen from the diagram in Figure 1 that those students who regularly handed in written work performed at a higher level than those who did not.”

The words at the beginning of the two sentences are typical phrases which turn up in scientific writing but which do not add to the meaning. The shortened versions are much more effective.

“Many young scientists need practice to improve their writing. Figure 1 shows that students who wrote regularly performed better.”

Discussion in class with my students on writing active or passive sentences invariably leads to the question whether it is acceptable to use “I” or “We” in scientific writing. Clearly, if I encourage the use of the active voice, I must also accept the use of first person pronouns. What about the scientific community as a whole? Ken Hyland and Kevin Jiang (2017) have provided data to answer this question. The authors noted an increase in the use of “I” and “We” in recent years in the natural sciences but less so in the social sciences. Thus, such sentences at least in the natural sciences are becoming more commonplace. My advice to my students at the end of the class discussions is pragmatic. If the writer feels that the clarity of the sentence benefits from “I” or “we”, then their use is justified.

Box 2.3 has a further six sentences with many needless words. section 2.5.3 presents the improved versions.

Box 2.3Omit needless words!

Rewrite the sentences to make them simpler. See how many words you can remove. My suggestions can be found in section 2.5.3.

1. It can be seen from Figure 1 that there is a significant correlation between the rate of growth of the incidence of cardiac-related disease and illness and the increasing frequency of the possession and use of a television.

2. It is a fact that 20% of the world's population has no clean water or enough to eat.

3. The effect of compound X on blood pressure has not yet been investigated in any detail.

4. Another important reason for this optimisation is the fact that we should try to get rid of pollution.

5. Synergy will lead to a significant reduction in the amount of funding required.

6. There is a considerable, if not extensive, body of literature dedicated to demonstrating that the Earth can be considered as a spherical body traversing a circular path around a similarly shaped, although significantly larger and completely different in nature, body which is in common parlance termed the Sun.