Speaker 1: Hi, it's EnergyLawProf. Today I'm talking about how to edit academic writing. So after you have that first draft of your article, and I'm going to focus on law review articles, how do you make it an effective piece of academic writing? So the first suggestion I have is that you always need to focus on your audience. So if you're writing a law review article, keep in mind that your initial audience is going to be likely second-year law students. So it's going to be people that have some background in legal terms, but they may not have any background in the specific area that you're writing about, and probably will have no background in the policy and academic debates that you're focusing on. And so you always want to keep that audience in mind. So let me give you an example of a piece of text and just show you how I would go through editing it. So let's start with this text. Venezuela produces two and a half million barrels per day of oil, and most oil from Venezuela goes to the United States. It also has 25 gigawatts of electric generation capacity, mostly from hydroelectricity. It has about 196 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves. Venezuela is having serious problems with its energy industry. Most of the energy it consumes is from oil, which is a dirtier form of energy. It utilizes far more oil than hydropower, which is less than a quarter of its energy. In 2009, President Chavez had to declare an electricity emergency and use rolling blackouts in order to prevent the electric grid from failing. Venezuela's oil production is also declining, although it has 298 billion barrels of proven reserves. Prior to 2005, it produced nearly 3 million barrels per day of oil. Venezuela also has had to start importing natural gas because of declining natural gas production. It produces about 800 BCF of gas a year. Venezuela mandates that PDVSA have 60% ownership of all oil projects, but not necessarily all natural gas projects. Venezuela is a major energy producer, but its energy industry faces many problems. So first thing to say about this text, basically grammatical, it has a lot of very interesting facts to somebody like me who specializes in the energy industry, so there's nothing entirely wrong with it. But I think when you start editing this kind of work, the first question you're going to ask yourself is, what's the point? What's the main point of any passage? And you should do this with every paragraph, every page, every section, really every sentence in your work. Now let's go over this thinking about A, what's the point? And B, why should anyone care? And think about if we can restructure it so that it is very clear what what the point is and why anyone should care. And you don't have to say people should care because usually why someone should care should just be implicit from what you, the way that you are writing, and from the order that you put your sentences in. So let's think about how to organize this. First, you always want your main point up front, and that's gonna help people understand why they are reading what they are reading. When you are asking someone to read a piece of academic work, you're asking them to read many pages. Think about how often you're willing to read many pages and when you're not required to do so. It better be well written and the point better be right up front. So let's think about what is the main point of all of this information that we're giving. Well, it's basically Venezuela is a major energy producer, but its energy industry faces many problems. That was at the end, and we don't ever want to put it at the end because that forces people to read through a large period of text without knowing why they're reading what they're reading. You can go ahead and sum up at the end again, but that's much less important than putting out the introduction. What is the point that the rest of this writing is going to be about? So you're trying to explain to somebody why Venezuela is a major energy producer and that it faces many problems. Now there's two sort of subsidiary main points that are being made here. That production of oil and gas is falling, that's a problem, and it sometimes does not have enough electricity production to serve its citizens. So now you've kind of put those main ideas up front. We know those are the two big things we're gonna read about. Falling oil and gas production and not enough electricity. And so we have a sense of what we're gonna read about in the rest of the section. And now that you've introduced that main up front, main idea up front, there may be opportunities to cut that idea where it's sort of repeated throughout the text. Okay, so now this is how it looks. We have it's a major energy producer, but its energy industry faces many problems. Production of oil and gas is falling. Sometimes does not have enough electricity. Now let's think about how we can organize this to be easier on our reader. And one thing you'll notice is that the text right now goes back and forth between whether it's talking about that first issue, oil and gas production falling, or that second issue, electricity. So one easy thing to do would be to divide it. And the sensible way to divide it would be to put them in the same order that they're put in that introductory sentence, right? The second sentence in this text, oil and gas is falling, and there's sometimes not enough electricity production. So let's consider those two issues, but reorder this so the text now first talks about oil and gas production falling, and then talks about shortages of electricity. And so in this next example, that's what I have done. So first, a section on oil and gas. Having section labels and headings can be very effective in helping readers understand what they're going to be reading and why it's important. So I have introduced a couple here. They don't even necessarily have to have a Roman numeral. It just says oil and gas period, and then electricity period. And you can see that I've cut and pasted things into each of those sections so that we first talk about oil and gas, and then we talk about electricity. Note that in that second sentence of this entire piece of text, it's production of oil and gas is falling, sometimes does not have enough electricity, it previews that order. So you don't need to say, first I'm going to discuss oil and gas, then I'm going to discuss electricity, because that can be very wordy. Instead, you can just put that first sentence in that order. First oil and gas, and then electricity. And that implies to the reader, first I'll talk about oil and gas, then I'll talk about electricity, without actually taking the time to say that. And that's a good thing. You want the order of what you're writing to be implied without taking too much time to go ahead and spell it out in words, because it can get boring to read something that keeps saying, first I'll discuss this, second I'll discuss this, third I'll discuss this. So generally I would try to avoid that, except for in a law review article, there is typically one roadmap paragraph at the end of the introduction, which is something that I've talked about in the tips I've given you all on law review articles. Okay, the other thing that we've done here is there was one sentence here that was really kind of confusing. Again, think about this reader who doesn't know anything about energy policy going in. It's the sentence that's highlighted in pink. Most of the energy it consumes is from oil, which is a dirtier form of energy. It utilizes far more oil than hydropower, which is less than a quarter of its energy. What's confusing about this is that when it's talking about oil, that's mostly used for transportation, and when it's talking about hydropower, that's mostly used for electricity. So you're kind of comparing apples and oranges, and that would be potentially confusing to somebody that's trying to understand the energy industry and might not realize that you can't just use hydropower instead of oil in a car. And so you want to think about how your reader is going to view this and make sure that you don't say anything that's just going to confuse the issues for them. So I recommended just cutting this. Alright, so now we have something that's the organization's going to make a lot more sense to the reader. We've got the main point up front, major energy producer, but problems. We have the organization previewed by the second sentence, which says oil and gas is falling. There's a shortage of, there are sometimes shortages of electricity production. We see we have section headings. One says oil and gas. The second says electricity. So we've made a lot of improvements to this. Let's think about finally how we could refine this text to make it easier on the reader and to offer some explanations of things that the reader might not understand. So a couple things that we can do. One, I love the numbers, they're great, but when you include them they won't mean much to most readers who don't have anything to compare them with. And so you want to, every time you use a number that might not be immediately apparent, whether it's a big number or a little number, etc. to the reader and how important it is, include some kind of comparison that makes it clear. Now don't, sometimes people include comparisons that really aren't relevant. They'll say, you know, this many miles of pipeline that goes to the moon and back three times. Okay, that's not relevant because nobody cares how much pipeline it takes to go to the moon and back. That's not what we're doing. You might want to compare it to something else they might be familiar with. So you might say, okay, that's twice as much pipeline as any other country, right? So you're making a comparative point that puts it in the context of what you're trying to say, which is if you're saying they have a lot more pipeline than anybody else, well then comparing it to some other countries might be a good way. Or if you're saying they have a lot more pipelines than any state, that might be a good way to say it. So in this example I've said, look, they produce two and a half million barrels per day of oil. That's more than any other US state, or sorry, rather any US state other than Texas. So it's a lot of oil, right? Texas produces more oil, but it's more than any other state would. And I think that's a helpful way of putting it in context that somebody might be familiar with. Oh, Texas is a big oil producer. It's not quite that much, but it is more than some other places that we might think of producing a lot of oil, like Alaska. Okay. Now another example. Venezuela has 298 billion barrels of proven reserves. Those are the largest reserves in the world. Nobody has more than that. That's a great way to put it in context and make people understand that's a big number. Okay. And then with natural gas, they produce more than 800 billion cubic feet of year. That's about 10% of Texas's production. So it's significant, but not necessarily huge. So Texas produces 10 times more natural gas. Okay. Now last step going through. You really want to go through every sentence and see if you can shorten it. See if you can make it simpler. For this, I always recommend going to that article by Eugene Volokh, How to Write Good Legal Stuff, which has so many suggestions of wordy phrases that can be cut down. Often, Word itself, the program, will actually suggest to you wordy phrases that you could cut down. And those are usually pretty good suggestions, so I'd follow those as well. But let me give you a couple examples. And these are both in that paper that I gave you a link to, How to Write Good Legal Stuff by Eugene Volokh. And what those two examples are here. One, you see where it says before 2005? The previous text had prior to 2005. And the problem with prior to 2005 is it's just not as brief as before. And so that article recommends every time you say prior to, you can probably say before. So just go through and if you've said that, say before. The other advantage of before is that's more like how people talk. And generally having a writing style that is more similar to spoken speech can be much more engaging for the reader. So every time you say prior to, go through and say before instead. Another example is in that last paragraph, there are two examples. And one is where it says in order to. Anytime that you have in order to, it is usually better just to say to. You don't need to say in order. And so the example there is, and use rolling blackouts in order to prevent the electric grid from failing. You can just delete in order and say roll and use rolling blackouts to prevent the electric grid from failing. So again, going through these, your paper line by line and eliminating these unnecessary words is very important. That example is also given in that Valak paper. Final example from the Valak paper, utilize. You almost never need to use the word utilize. You should use the word use instead. So President Chavez had to declare an electricity emergency and use rolling blackouts. Previously the text had and utilize rolling blackouts. Use is shorter and it's also more similar to the words that people actually use when they speak. And having that style that's more similar to the words people actually use when they're talking to you will make your writing more engaging. So this is our final version of this. You can see we have the order. The main point is right up front. It's the first sentence. The order of analysis is implied by the second sentence which also summarizes the main topics but it doesn't take time to say I will talk about this and I will talk about that. Instead it just directly states the two conclusions that will follow in the next two sections. Then we have the two sections. All the relevant information is organized into either oil and gas or electricity. And finally we've gone through and done everything we can to explain terms that might not make sense to a reader who is not an expert in the area. And we've also gone through to eliminate all the words that we can to make things as easy on the reader as they can as engaging as possible so they want to read about these points that we've spent so much time researching and so much time thinking about organizing what we have to say on them.