Defining Good Writing in Academic Terms and in Plain English

From Ann Trubek in Five Lessons for Writing to the Public (here):

Regarding neurological patterns of attention and engagement, frequently, textual formats are consumed with a decline in interest in addition to decreased comprehension of linguistic units when patterns of grammatical units that lack indication of agency and subject behavior are employed.

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Write well. Be lively. Select words carefully. Use active verbs. Vary sentence length. Make the subjects of your sentences characters. Many scholars craft boring, dense, pedantic sentences. Don’t be like them.

By the way, if you want to write not just for academics, but for magazines as well, the article offers good advice.

(ljs)