Getting Your Scientific Manuscript to the Right Length

An important thing to keep in mind when writing a scientific document is making every section as efficient as possible. Many journals impose a word limit on manuscripts and even a separate one for the abstract. The same is true when applying for grants. Numerous funding agencies impose limits on pages or word or page counts in proposals. Naturally, you don’t want to remove any vital information from your document, but you also want it to be short enough to be accepted. Here, I’m going to show you a few techniques to cut excess words from your manuscript.

Use Active Voice

Active voice is preferable to passive voice in scientific papers for a couple of reasons. First, it eliminates dangling modifiers, which makes your sentences more comfortable to read. Second, it’s far more efficient for your word count.

Example:

Passive Voice: The experimental drug was found to block angiogenesis in cancerous tumors.

(11 words)

Active Voice: The experimental drug blocked angiogenesis in cancerous tumors.

(8 words)

That’s three words saved from switching to active voice. It may not seem like a lot, but the benefits add up when utilized over 10 or 20 paragraphs.

Avoid ‘There Are’ and ‘There Is’

These phrases are commonly seen in scientific papers and can nearly always be eliminated. ‘There are’ and ‘There is’ are often placed at the beginning of a sentence but can be removed with just a little tweaking.

Less efficient: There is evidence suggesting that the new bacteria is resistant to multiple drugs.

(13 words)

More efficient: Evidence suggests that the new bacteria is resistant to multiple drugs.

(11 words)

What you’re doing here is converting a sentence in present continuous tense to present simple tense on an advanced level. However, that’s a post for another time. For now, look for and eliminate these phrases in your writing to save dozens of words across a manuscript.

Remove ‘That’

Getting away from grammar rules, ‘that’ is simply an overused word in scientific writing. It’s so common that it likely didn’t even register when I used it in the previous example. Let’s fix it.

More efficient: Evidence suggests that the new bacteria is resistant to multiple drugs.

(11 words)

Even More Efficient: Evidence suggests the new bacteria is resistant to multiple drugs.

(10 words)

Take Out Conjunctions

In a previous post, I talked about making your writing flow better by connecting sentences. However, when you’re budgeting words, flow is less important than efficiency. One can remove conjunctions by splitting longer phrases up into individual sentences.

Conjunction: Group A was given water prior to the exam, and Group B was given a sugary beverage. (17 words)

No Conjunction: Group A was given water prior to the exam. Group B was given a sugary beverage. (16 words)

This is only one word, but think again of the effect over probably dozens of pages. Rather than entirely restructuring your dissertation, you only need some minor tweaks to get your work published.

Eliminate Unspecific Modifiers and Adverbs

In a standard piece of writing, words like ‘greatly’, ‘markedly’, or ‘appreciably’ can enhance and clarify an author’s meaning. In a scientific context, these words don’t mean anything. As mentioned before, following a word limit often means ignoring many

of the usual rules of good writing, and this is an example. In the name of efficiency, remove any modifier that is not strictly necessary to the reader understanding your work.

Speed Round: Common Phrases You Can Trim Down

Some phrases are so common we use them without thinking, even when there’s a better option. Here are a few word-saving replacements to use in your writing.

In order to becomes to

Our results indicate becomes therefore

One of the becomes A

The majority of becomes most

Saving two words apiece, I recommend keeping these in mind while editing a scientific paper.

Be Careful of Repetition

This tip isn’t so much about increasing the efficiency of your sentences as it is a good rule of thumb. If information is already displayed in a figure or a table, it doesn’t need to be reiterated in the text. An author might think repetition is an excellent way to draw attention to important aspects of the data, but this should be handled regarding the relevant figure.

This same advice holds for information or analysis that was written in a previous section of the manuscript. Once you finish your paper, read through the whole thing to make sure you aren’t telling the reader the same thing multiple times. If your scientific document suffers from this issue, editing out repetition could be what you need to get your paper within the word limit.

Naturally, there’s no one silver bullet to make your paper fit under the word constraint. But, utilizing these tools together, you can vastly reduce the word count of your manuscript. To learn more about making sure your scientific paper gets accepted, contact me.