As a writer, your job is to communicate clearly and effectively with your audience. But as a writer, you also want to be seen as an authority figure and someone that your readers can trust to lead them through the topic of the piece you are writing.
To gain that sense of authority, many writers want to sound more professional and sophisticated. There is a right way and a wrong way to try to sound more professional and sophisticated, and in this article, we’ll take a look at some of the strategies that work and those that don’t so you can sound as smart as you know you are.
So, let’s look at some strategies you can employ to sound more professional and sophisticated. These expert tips and guidelines can be easily used by most of California students who need help writing papers and essays in colleges and universities.
Improve Your Vocabulary in Writing
The first and best way to make your writing sound more sophisticated and professional is to improve your vocabulary. Learning new words will help you to develop stronger writing by giving you a broader range of options to express your exact meaning in any given situation. For example, “verdant” carries a slightly different meaning than “green,” and being able to deploy the right color word to express what the reader should feel at any given moment can make your writing richer and more involving. English has one of the most expansive vocabularies in the world, and that gives you more opportunity to find the right word for any situation. If you ever find yourself thinking, “I need someone to write essay for me,” consider expanding your vocabulary first to enhance your own writing skills.
Don’t Use Highfalutin Language in Writing
One major problem that a writer will face is the temptation to use elevated language in order to sound smart. However, using too many big words is just as bad—indeed, worse—than using simplistic language. Paradoxically, sounding professional and sophisticated often comes from using simple, natural language. For example, the Associated Press sets the standards for how journalists write. Journalism sounds professional and sophisticated, but it is written at an eighth grade reading level.
Using language that your readers will understand is essential for developing a relationship of trust with your readers. If you use words that they don’t understand, they might think you are trying to talk over them and reject your message. Worse, utilizing excessive verbiage of incontrovertible complexity manifests the kind of reader fatigue you probably felt reading the first half of this sentence. It’s hard to read long strings of big words, and that makes you sound not sophisticated but pompous. A great writer knows how to use the smallest word that conveys the full meaning. That doesn’t mean you never use big words, only that you use them when it is essential for meaning.
Mark Twain once commented, “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.” He was trying to say the same thing—avoid big words just for the sake of using them. Natural language sounds best and actually sounds more sophisticated than elevated language.
This is one of the big problems that academic writers face. Academic writing is notorious for being difficult to read in the name of sophistication. Indeed, professors often joke that they know an academic article must be good because they don’t understand it. Professors can see their reputations sink if they write papers that are too easy to read. This creates a perverse incentive to write in a way that only those who are in the exact same field can understand, creating knowledge silos that prevent interdisciplinary knowledge transfer and hoarding knowledge among a few experts in any given subject.
Effective Ways of Better Academic Writing
The unique challenges of creating effective academic writing are often a problem for students who are just learning the art of academic writing. Many students have difficulty transitioning to the academic style of writing. Because of this, it can often be beneficial for students to see how a professional writer would approach their essay topic. When students make use of pro essay writing services like SmartWritingService.com, they can get help to develop their academic writing skills. Custom academic papers will help students to see how to write about a topic in a sophisticated and professional way without crossing over into elevated language that can damage the quality of a paper.
Use the Active Voice in Writing
Another tip for sounding more professional and sophisticated is to use the active voice in your essay writing. The active voice makes the action sound more direct and keeps your writing engaging. In academic writing, there is a tendency to use the passive voice in order to try to sound objective and avoid referring to oneself. However, the passive voice is tiring for readers because it hides the action of the sentence and saps the sentence of its agency and its energy. Therefore, using the active voice is the better choice—and as a bonus, it also sounds better and more professional. Compare, for example, the difference between “The ball was hit by the boy” to “The boy hit the ball,” and you can see the difference.
Eliminate Unnecessary Words in Your Papers
More words don’t make for better sentences. To sound more sophisticated, say more with fewer words. Cut out unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. If your sentence’s meaning doesn’t change when you remove a word, then the word wasn’t necessary to begin with. Simple, direct sentences are more powerful and convey your meaning more forcefully.
