Introduction

Readers will accept the researcher’s claim when the readers understand the claim precisely. To understand the claim, the readers first need to understand the writings of the researcher. Hence, the researchers must ensure that the claims are clearly conveyed to the readers through the writings. However, when the researchers re-read their own writing, they do not understand which sentences are ambiguous and need revision. Because the researchers already know the intended meaning, they read into their own sentences what they expect readers to get out of those sentences. To bypass this cognitive bias and ensure that the sentences will be as clear to the readers as they are to the researchers, the researchers need to identify the ambiguous sentences. We discuss several ways below on how we as researchers can identify those ambiguous sentences.

Unnecessary Complexity in Academic Writing

We show three styles of writing below to convey the same meaning.

Style A (Too Hard): The sentences are long and confusing. Readers do not like this style.

Example: Conventional cybersecurity paradigms dictate that signature-based recognition mechanisms maximize malicious package interception efficacy by cross-referencing cryptographic hashes against known threat repositories. However, unless static signature heuristics are supplemented by dynamic behavioral telemetry, and unless runtime execution environments facilitate behavioral isolation analysis, subversion rather than optimization of software supply chain integrity may occur.

Style B (Too Simple): The sentences are correct but too short. It sounds like someone talking to a child.

Example: Security tools want to catch bad code packages. They look for signatures. Signatures are like fingerprints of known malware. When tools find a match, they stop the threat. The software stays safe. But tools also need to watch how a package behaves when it runs. If tools do not monitor package behavior, sneaky malware will slip through. Then the system gets hacked.

Style C (Just Right): The sentences are clear and smart. This is the best way to write.

Example: Security teams traditionally assume that signature matching is enough to detect malicious packages by catching known malware variants before deployment. But unless static checks are paired with dynamic behavioral analysis, and unless testing pipelines evaluate what the code actually does at runtime, sophisticated threats will bypass detection and compromise the supply chain.

A few researchers believe that making complex ideas clear needs complex writing style. However, messy writing means the writer had messy thoughts. Good writers work hard to make their ideas easy for others to read. New researchers have two problems when they write. Firstly, when they learn something new and hard, the brain is too busy thinking about the new idea, so the writing gets worse. Secondly, when they see complex writing in academic books, they think that they must write that way, which eventually makes the writing worse. Writing in a complex and ambiguous way is a mistake. Researchers should fix the confusing sentences in their research articles and make the writing clear.