bad essay words

164 Phrases and words You Should Never Use in an Essay—and the Powerful Alternatives you Should

This list of words you should never use in an essay will help you write compelling, succinct, and effective essays that impress your professor.

Words and phrases you shouldn't use in an essay

Writing an essay can be a time-consuming and laborious process that seems to take forever.

But how often do you put your all into your paper only to achieve a lame grade?

You may be left scratching your head, wondering where it all went wrong.

Chances are, like many students, you were guilty of using words that completely undermined your credibility and the effectiveness of your argument.

Our professional essay editors have seen it time and time again: The use of commonplace, seemingly innocent, words and phrases that weaken the power of essays and turn the reader off.

But can changing a few words here and there really make a difference to your grades?

Absolutely.

If you’re serious about improving your essay scores, you must ensure you make the most of every single word and phrase you use in your paper and avoid any that rob your essay of its power (check out our guide to editing an essay for more details).

Here is our list of words and phrases you should ditch, together with some alternatives that will be so much more impressive. For some further inspiration, check out our AI essay writer .

Vague and Weak Words

What are vague words and phrases.

Vague language consists of words and phrases that aren’t exact or precise. They can be interpreted in multiple ways and, as such, can confuse the reader.

Essays that contain vague language lack substance and are typically devoid of any concrete language. As such, you should keep your eyes peeled for unclear words when proofreading your essay .

Why You Shouldn’t Use VAGUE Words in Essays

Professors detest vagueness.

In addition to being ambiguous, vague words and phrases can render a good piece of research absolutely useless.

Let’s say you have researched the link between drinking soda and obesity. You present the findings of your literature review as follows:

“Existing studies have found that drinking soda leads to weight gain.”

Your professor will ask:

What research specifically? What/who did it involve? Chimpanzees? Children? OAPs? Who conducted the research? What source have you used?

And the pat on the back you deserve for researching the topic will never transpire.

Academic essays should present the facts in a straightforward, unambiguous manner that leaves no doubt in the mind of the reader.

Key takeaway: Be very specific in terms of what happened, when, where, and to whom.

VAGUE Words and Phrases You Shouldn’t Use in an Essay


	, in combination with a range. Use: “The event was attended by approximately 80-100 people.” Not: “The event was attended by about 100 people.”
	Provide very specific detail in your essay. Use: “When the clinical trials were complete.” Not: “When the research was almost complete.”
	State which area specifically. Use: “There was a significant amount of flooding in the north of Miami.” Not: “There was a significant amount of flooding in the area.”
	Use more specific adjectives to describe the person, place, or thing. Use: “The elephant weighed 18,000 pounds and was 13-foot tall.” Not: “The elephant was big and tall.”
	Delete. Use: “The interesting thing about the character was…” Not: “The character was kind of interesting because…”
	Use: “The results add value to the existing body of knowledge on obesity among youths because…” Not: “The results were meaningful because…”
	Replace with something more precise: Use: “The character’s quest was unsuccessful because…” Not: “The character more or less failed in her quest.”
	State exactly who. Use: “These findings were replicated by Ghott et al. (1990).” Not: “These findings were replicated by other researchers.”
	Qualify what you mean by “poor.” Use: “The essay grade was ten points below a pass.” Not: “The essay grade was poor.”
	Be specific about what situation you are referring to. Use: “This essay will explain the political events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Not: “This essay will explain the situation that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
	Specifically delineate the “something” you are referring to. Use: “This finding teaches us that the ideal storage temperature is…” Not: “This finding teaches us something.”
	Qualify your opinion with more in-depth information. Use: “The essay was interesting but could be improved by…” Not: “The essay was sort of interesting.”
	Explain what specifically you are referring to: Use: “We added the salt powder to the solution.” Not: “We added the stuff to the solution.”
	Replace with something more precise: Use: “I found this comparison between rich and poor most interesting.” Not: “This was the thing I found most interesting.”

Flabby Words and Expressions

What are flabby expressions.

Flabby expressions and words are wasted phrases. They don’t add any value to your writing but do take up the word count and the reader’s headspace.

Flabby expressions frequently contain clichéd, misused words that don’t communicate anything specific to the reader. For example, if someone asks you how you are feeling and you reply, “I’m fine,” you’re using a flabby expression that leaves the inquirer none the wiser as to how you truly are.

Why Should Flabby Words be Removed from an Essay?

Flabby words are fine in everyday conversation and even blog posts like this.

However, they are enemies of clear and direct essays. They slow down the pace and dilute the argument.

When grading your essay, your professor wants to see the primary information communicated clearly and succinctly.

Removing the examples of flabby words and expressions listed below from your paper will automatically help you to take your essay to a higher level.

Key takeaway: When it comes to essays, brevity is best.

Flabby Words and Expressions You Shouldn’t Use in an Essay


	Use: “I will continue to present the final analysis.” Not: “I will go on to present the final analysis.”
	Use: “This research proved…” Not: “I might add that this research proved…”
	Use: “This essay effectively demonstrated…” Not: “This essay was effective in terms of…”
	Use: “Shakespeare was a talented writer.” Not: “In my opinion, Shakespeare was a talented writer.”
	Use: “Although this paper was written 50 years later, nothing has changed.” Not: “In spite of the fact this paper was written 50 years later, nothing has changed.”
	Use: “If new research emerges, the situation may change.” Not: “In the event that new research emerges, the situation may change.”
	Use: “I concluded that the hypothesis was incorrect.” Not: “In the process of writing the essay, I concluded that the hypothesis was incorrect.”
	Use: “Freud probably believed…” Not: “It seems like Freud was of the opinion…”
	Use: “They reached the United States.” Not: “They made it to the United States.”
	Use: “Kant frequently argued this point.” Not: “Kant argued this point on a regular basis.”
	Use: “In this paper, I will highlight the most relevant findings of my study.” Not: “In this paper, I will pick out the most relevant findings of my study.”
	Use: “It is important to emphasize the implications of this argument.” Not: “It is important to point out the implications of this argument.”
	Use: “Start by describing the research methodology.” Not: “The first step is to describe the research methodology.”
	Use: “It is clear the government must act now to resolve the issues.” Not: “It is clear the government must take action now to resolve the issues.”
	Use: “In Section 6 of the essay, we will examine the research findings.” Not: “In Section 6 of the essay, we will talk about the research findings.”
	Use: “Consider the thesis statement…” Not: “The most important thing is to consider the thesis statement.”
	Use: “Jane Eyre cried because…” Not: “The reason Jane Eyre cried was because…”
	Use: “Students frequently fail this exam.” Not: “This is an exam that students frequently fail.”
	Use: “This essay has demonstrated…” Not: “Time and time again, this essay has demonstrated…”
	Use: “After reviewing the survey outputs, I will determine…” Not: “After reviewing the survey outputs, I will try to figure out…”
	Use: “The argument was fascinating.” Not: “The argument was very interesting.”
	Use: “I then revaluated the research findings.” Not: “I then went back over the research findings.”
	Use: “We must consider the historical context when reviewing George Orwell’s work.” Not: “When it comes to the work of George Orwell, we must consider the historical context.”
	Use: “This essay, written over 100 years ago, offers an insight…” Not: “This essay, which was written over 100 years ago, offers an insight…”
	Use: “Kotler, a renowned marketing expert, claims…” Not: “Kotler, who is a renowned marketing expert, claims…”
	Use: “Every experiment in the study will differ.” Not: “Every experiment in the study will be different.”
	Use: “The thesis statement asserts…” Not: “With reference to the thesis statement…”

Words to Avoid in an Essay: Redundant Words

What are redundant words.

Redundant words and phrases don’t serve any purpose.

In this context, redundant means unnecessary.

Many everyday phrases contain redundant vocabulary; for example, add up, as a matter of fact, current trends, etc.

We have become so accustomed to using them in everyday speech that we don’t stop to question their place in formal writing.

Why You Shouldn’t Use Redundant Words in Essays

Redundant words suck the life out of your essay.

They can be great for adding emphasis in a conversational blog article like this, but they do not belong in formal academic writing.

Redundant words should be avoided for three main reasons:

They interrupt the flow of the essay and unnecessarily distract the reader.
They can undermine the main point you are trying to make in your paper.
They can make you look uneducated.

The most effective essays are those that are concise, meaningful, and astute. If you use words and phrases that carry no meaning, you’ll lose the reader and undermine your credibility.

Key takeaway: Remove any words that don’t serve a purpose.

Redundant Words and Phrases You Shouldn’t Use in an Essay


	Use: “The water was freezing.” Not: “The water was absolutely freezing.”
	Use: “The research findings revealed…” Not: “The actual research findings revealed…”
	Use: “Adds an element to the analysis.” Not: “Adds an additional element to the analysis.”
	Use: “We will sum the responses.” Not: “We will add up the responses.”
	Use: “Hamlet had no choice but to…” Not: “Hamlet had no alternative choice but to…”
	Use: “Throughout human history, females have…” Not: “All throughout human history, females have…”
	Use: “The animals included dogs, cats, birds, etc.”Not: “The animals included dogs, cats, birds, and etc.”
	Use: “The survey findings indicated…” Not: “As a matter of fact, the survey findings indicated…”
	Use: “The theme of love overcoming evil is compelling.” Not: “As far as I am concerned, the theme of love overcoming evil is compelling.”
	Use: “This prompts me to question the accuracy of the findings.” Not: “This prompts me to ask the question: ‘Were the findings accurate?’”
	Use: “We assembled the various parts.” Not: “We assembled together the various parts.”
	Use: “We cannot confirm the validity of the findings.” Not: “At the present time, we cannot confirm the validity of the findings.”
	Use: “According to the findings…” Not: “According to the basic findings…”
	Use: “The elements of the story blend well.” Not: “The elements of the story blend together well.”
	Use: “The Romans were defeated.” Not: “The Romans were completely defeated.”
	Use: “I will then connect the main aspects of the analysis.” Not: “I will then connect together the main aspects of the analysis.”
	Use: “Some people argue the trend of using big data to understand customer needs won’t continue.” Not: “Some people argue the current trend of using big data to understand customer needs won’t continue.”
	Use: “The findings were scrutinized.” Not: “The findings underwent careful scrutiny.”
	Use: “The remains were near the dwelling.” Not: “The remains were found in close proximity to the dwelling.”
	Use: “To achieve victory, it was necessary to eradicate the enemy.” Not: “To achieve victory, it was necessary to completely eradicate the enemy.”
	Use: “The organization’s assets depreciated over time.” Not: “The organization’s assets depreciated in value over time.”
	Use: “We identified six kinds of bacteria.” Not: “We identified six different kinds of bacteria.”
	Use: “The test failed because the fire was too hot.” Not: “The test failed due to the fact that the fire was too hot.”
	Use: “During the story…” Not: “During the course of the story…
	Use: “The number of incorrect answers dwindled.” Not: “The number of incorrect answers dwindled down.”
	Use: “Every scenario was tested.” Not: “Each and every scenario was tested.”
	Use: “They are equal in height, but Sarah is a faster runner.” Not: “They are equal to one another in height, but Sarah is a faster runner.”
	Use: “The findings were the same.” Not: “The findings were the exact same.”
	Use: “The result was the fall of the dictatorship.” Not: “The end result was that the dictatorship fell.”
	Use: “Although the weights of the materials were equal, their performance was not comparable.” Not: “Although the weights of the materials were equal to one another, their performance was not comparable.”
	Use: “All participants returned the completed survey.” Not: “Every single person returned the completed survey.”
	Use: “It is interesting to observe how the characters evolve.” Not: “It is interesting to observe how the characters evolve over time.”
	Use: “I completed the test with a classmate.” Not: “I completed the test with a fellow classmate.”
	Use: “I continued to add water until the vessel was filled.” Not: “I continued to add water until the vessel was filled to capacity.”
	Use: “The researcher concluded that the test was reliable.” Not: “The researchers’ final conclusion was that the test was reliable.”
	Use: “Shakespeare remains foremost a poet.” Not: “Shakespeare remains first and foremost a poet.”
	Use: “The idea to test the relationship between speed and weight was conceived when…” Not: “The idea to test the relationship between speed and weight was first conceived when…”
	Use: “First, I was interested in the character’s name.” Not: “First of all, I was interested in the character’s name.”
	Use: “The bird flew rapidly.” Not: “The bird flew through the air rapidly.”
	Use: “The results indicate that imports can be detrimental to the economy.” Not: “The results indicate that foreign imports can be detrimental to the economy.”
	Use: “I am a graduate of HKU.” Not: “I am a former graduate of HKU.”
	Use: “The research fuses a myriad of experimental techniques.” Not: “The research fuses together a myriad of experimental techniques.”
	Use: “My plans for the next stage of the research include…” Not: “My future plans for the next stage of the research include…”
	Use: “Gather your thoughts and develop a new thesis.” Not: “Gather your thoughts together and develop a new thesis.”
	Use: “The study sample consisted of 150 members of the public.” Not: “The study sample consisted of 150 members of the general public.”
	Use: “The specimen had grown by 5 cm.” Not: “The specimen had grown in size.”
	Use: “A Bunsen burner was used to heat the solution.” Not: “A Bunsen burner was used to heat up the solution.”
	Use: “The machine parts were connected using a tube.” Not: “The machine parts were connected using a hollow tube.”
	Use: “It is important that the tools integrate.” Not: “It is important that the tools integrate with each other.”
	Use: “To prove the hypothesis, this essay will…” Not: “In order to prove the hypothesis, this essay will…”
	Use: “This essay will introduce the idea that…” Not: “This essay will introduce the new idea that…”
	Use: “This paper describes a collaboration between…” Not: “This paper describes a joint collaboration between…”
	Use: “Kotler is an expert in the field of marketing.” Not: “Kotler is a knowledgeable expert in the field of marketing.”
	Use: “This idea will be explored in more depth later.” Not: “This idea will be explored in more depth at a later time.”
	Use: “The substance was made of…” Not: “The substance was made out of…”
	Use: “These findings represent a breakthrough in the field of…” Not: “These findings represent a major breakthrough in the field of…”
	Use: “Othello may have been…” Not: “Othello may possibly have been…”
	Use: “Blyton’s use of alliteration was unique.” Not: “Blyton’s use of alliteration was most unique.”
	Use: “The two philosophers respected one another.” Not: “The two philosophers had mutual respect for one another.”
	Use: “Never have I been so amazed.” Not: “Never before have I been so amazed.”
	Use: “Henry Ford presented an innovation that changed the world.” Not: “Henry Ford presented a new innovation that changed the world.”
	Use: “The grade for my essay is pending.” Not: “The grade for my essay is now pending.”
	Use: “The digital form was created by…” Not: “The digital form was originally created by…”
	Use: “My experience has taught me…” Not: “My past experience has taught me…”
	Use: “It was during that period that steam power emerged.” Not: “It was during that period of time that steam power emerged.”
	Use: “Night and day are opposites.” Not: “Night and day are polar opposites.”
	Use: “The findings are not available at present.” Not: “The findings are not available at the present time.”
	Use: “This essay will argue that the reason…” Not: “This essay will argue that the reason why…”
	Use: “At this point, we will refer to the work of…” Not: “At this point, we will refer back to the work of…”
	Use: “This essay will examine…” Not: “This essay will take a look at…”
	Use: “We will perform all the tests within that time frame.” Not: “We will perform all the tests within that time.”
	Use: “The respondents were asked to write their names.” Not: “The respondents were asked to write down their names.”

Colloquial Expressions and Grammar Expletives

What are colloquial expressions.

A colloquial expression is best described as a phrase that replicates the way one would speak.

The use of colloquial language represents an informal, slang style of English that is not suitable for formal and academic documents.

For example:

Colloquial language: “The findings of the study appear to be above board.”

Suitable academic alternative: “The findings of the study are legitimate.”

What are Grammar Expletives?

Grammar expletives are sentences that start with here , there, or it .

We frequently use constructions like these when communicating in both spoken and written language.

But did you know they have a distinct grammatical classification?

They do; the expletive.

Grammar expletives (not to be confused with cuss words) are used to introduce clauses and delay the subject of the sentence. However, unlike verbs and nouns, which play a specific role in expression, expletives do not add any tangible meaning. Rather, they act as filler words that enable the writer to shift the emphasis of the argument. As such, grammar expletives are frequently referred to as “empty words.”

Removing them from your writing can help to make it tighter and more succinct. For example:

Sentence with expletive there : There are numerous reasons why it was important to write this essay. Sentence without expletive: It was important to write this essay for numerous reasons.

Why Should Colloquial Expressions and Grammar Expletives be Removed from an Essay?

While colloquial expressions and grammar expletives are commonplace in everyday speech and are completely acceptable in informal emails and chatroom exchanges, they can significantly reduce the quality of formal essays.

Essays and other academic papers represent formal documents. Frequent use of slang and colloquial expressions will undermine your credibility, make your writing unclear, and confuse the reader. In addition, they do not provide the exactness required in an academic setting.

Make sure you screen your essay for any type of conversational language; for example, figures of speech, idioms, and clichés.

Key takeaway: Grammar expletives use unnecessary words and make your word count higher while making your prose weaker.

Words and Phrases You Shouldn’t Use in an Essay


	Use: “Blood is thicker than water.” Not: “It is a fact that blood is thicker than water.”
	Use: “As logical to expect…” Not: “As it would be logical to expect…”
	Use: “The evidence suggests the hypothesis is correct.” Not: “There is evidence to suggest that the hypothesis is correct.”
	Use: “This essay presents numerous ideas.” Not: “There are numerous ideas presented in this essay.”
	Use: “Future studies will investigate this area further.” Not: “There will be future studies to investigate this idea further.”
	Use: “We expect the outcomes to indicate…” Not: “All things being equal, we expect the outcomes to indicate…”
	Use: “This paper has achieved its objective of…” Not: “For all intents and purposes, this paper has achieved its objective of…”
	Use: “The story predominantly explored the theme of unrequited love.” Not: “For the most part, the story explored the theme of unrequited love.”
	Use: “This essay reviewed the idea of sentiment.” Not: “For the purpose of this essay, the idea of sentiment was reviewed…”
	Use: “Soda consumption is linked with obesity.” Not: “Here’s the thing: Soda consumption is linked with obesity.”
	Use: “The recommendations follow the analysis.” Not: “The recommendations are after the analysis.”
	Use: “We effectively reduced the mistakes.” Not: “We effectively cut down on the number of mistakes.”

Nominalization

What is normalization.

A normalized sentence is one that is structured such that the abstract nouns do the talking.

For example, a noun, such as solution , can be structured to exploit its hidden verb, solve .

The act of transforming a word from a verb into a noun is known as normalization.

Should normalization be Removed from an Essay?

This is no universal agreement as to whether normalization should be removed from an essay. Some scholars argue that normalization is important in scientific and technical writing because abstract prose is more objective. Others highlight how normalizations can make essays more difficult to understand .

The truth is this: In the majority of essays, it isn’t possible to present an entirely objective communication; an element of persuasion is inherently incorporated. Furthermore, even the most objective academic paper will be devoid of meaning unless your professor can read it and make sense of it. As such, readability is more important than normalization.

You will need to take a pragmatic approach, but most of the time, your writing will be clearer and more direct if you rely on verbs as opposed to abstract nouns that were formed from verbs. As such, where possible, you should revise your sentences to make the verbs do the majority of the work.

For example,

Use: “This essay analyses and solves the pollution problem.”

Not: “This essay presents an evaluation of the pollution issue and presents a solution.”

While normalized sentences are grammatically sound, they can be vague.

In addition, humans tend to prefer vivid descriptions, and verbs are more vivid, informative, and powerful than nouns.

Key takeaway: Normalization can serve a purpose, but only use it if that purpose is clear.

normalization You Shouldn’t Use in an Essay


	Use: “I will then analyze the data.” Not: “I will then progress to present an analysis of the data.”
	Use: “She appeared unexpectedly.” Not: “Her appearance was unexpected.”
	Use: “We attempted to reproduce the results but failed.” Not: “Our attempts at reproducing the results were unsuccessful.”
	Use: “Winston believed the state was corrupt.” Not: “It was Winston’s belief that the state was corrupt.”
	Use: “Robert’s carelessness caused John’s death.” Not: “John died because of Robert’s carelessness.”
	Use: “The temperature dropped due to the rain.” Not: “The rain caused a drop in temperature.”
	Use: “Jesus’ behavior confused the priest.” Not: “Jesus’ behavior caused considerable confusion for the priest.”
	Use: “We compared the height and weight of the participants.” Not: “We drew a comparison between the height and the weight of the participants.”
	Use: “The flavor weakened when water was added.” Not: “The flavor decreased in strength when water was added.”
	Use: “Kotler defined strategic marketing as…” Not: “Kotler’s definition of strategic marketing was as follows…”
	Use: “I will conclude by describing the main findings.” Not: “I will conclude with a description of the main findings.”
	Use: “Reproducing the results was difficult.” Not: “I experienced difficulties reproducing the results.”
	Use: “The hero easily won the battle.” Not: “The hero won the battle with ease.”

That’s a lot to take in.

You may be wondering why you should care?

Cutting the fat helps you present more ideas and a deeper analysis.

Don’t be tempted to write an essay that is stuffed with pompous, complex language: It is possible to be smart and simple.

Bookmark this list now and return to it when you are editing your essays. Keep an eye out for the words you shouldn’t use in an essay, and you’ll write academic papers that are more concise, powerful, and readable.

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List of 125 Words and Phrases You Should Never Use in an Essay

about/around	Use "approximately" instead.
absolute best	"Absolute" is redundant—just use "best."
absolute worst	For the same reason as above, just use "worst."
absolutely	Eliminate unnecessary adverbs in academic writing.
absurd	Don't say something is absurd; show that it is by using logical argumentation.
actual	It is unlikely that the meaning of your sentence will be altered by deleting this usually redundant word.
add an additional	"Additional" is redundant—remove it.
all throughout	"All" is redundant.
almost	Specify the level of progress instead of using vague language.
alternative choice	Use either of these words but not both together.
amazing	Do not use emotive language in academic writing.
and etc.	This is grammatically incorrect—just use "etc."
area	Specify which area you are talking about.
as a matter of fact	This is colloquial language and inappropriate for an essay.
ask the question	Just use "question."
assemble together	Just use "assemble."
at a later time/date	The concept of time is implicit, so just use "later."
basic	Try deleting this word; nine times out of ten, it will make your sentence read better.
beautiful	Do not use emotive language in academic writing.
belief	Rephrase this using the verb "believe."
big, small, short, tall	Describe the exact size rather than using these words.
blend together	"Together" is redundant—just use "blend."
careful scrutiny	"Careful" is redundant—just use "scrutiny."
caused considerable confusion	Rephrase this using the verb "confuse."
certainly	Skepticism is a key academic value; certainty has no place.
close proximity	This is wordy; just use "near."
completely	Remove unnecessary adverbs.
connect together	"Together" is redundant—just use "connect."
cut down on	Use "reduce" instead of employing a figure of speech.
decrease in strength	Say "weaken" instead—it's more concise.
depreciate in value	The word "depreciate" already implies a value is being discussed, so delete "in value."
different kinds	"Different" is usually unnecessary in this phrase.
disagreeable	This is an emotional word, which should be avoided in academic writing.
disgusting	Use less emotive and more descriptive language.
due to	Use "because" instead.
during the course of	"The course of" is redundant—just use "during."
dwindle down	"Down" is redundant—just use "dwindle."
each and every	Use either "each" or "every."
equal to one another	"To one another" is redundant—just use "equal."
evolve over time	All evolution happens over time, so delete "over time."
exceptional	If something is exceptional, demonstrate how so using facts and allow your reader to reach their own conclusion.
fellow classmate/colleague	All colleagues and classmates are fellows, so there is no need to use that word.
filled to capacity	"To capacity" is redundant—just use "filled."
first and foremost	Choose one, don't use both.
first conceived	"First" is unnecessary.
first of all	"Of all" is redundant—just use "first."
fly through the air	"Through the air" is redundant—just use "fly."
for all intents and purposes	This phrase is a mouthful and usually redundant.
for the most part	Wordy; try "predominantly" instead.
for the purpose of	This concept can be expressed in fewer words than this.
foreign imports	All imports are foreign, so just say "imports."
former graduate	Once a graduate, always a graduate—"former" is inaccurate.
fuse/join/merge/mix together	The word "together" is redundant when used with any of these verbs.
future plans	All plans are for the future, so just say "plans."
gather together	The word "together" is redundant—just use "gather."
general public	"General" adds nothing—just use "public."
go on	This phrase is too casual in most contexts; use "continue" instead.
gorgeous	Overly emotive for academic writing.
here’s the thing	This phrase is too colloquial for use in academic writing.
hollow tube	Tubes are hollow by definition.
I might add	If you want to add something, just add it—no need to say you're doing so.
in my opinion	The whole essay is your opinion—focus on supporting your argument coherently.
in order to	"In order" is redundant—just use "to."
in spite of the fact	Too wordy—just say "although."
in the event of/that	This phrase is wordy; you can express the same concept with a two-letter word—"it."
incontrovertibly	Nothing is incontrovertible in academia. If you want to assert something, back it up.
integrate with each other	"With each other" is redundant—just use "integrate."
introduce the new	Just say "introduce."
irrefutable	Nothing is irrefutable in academic writing. This word will only make your reader question why you haven't backed up your assertion.
it seems like	Use "probably" instead.
joint collaboration	All collaborations are joint, so delete "joint."
kind of	This phrase is too casual for an essay.
knowledgeable expert	All experts are knowledgeable, so just use "expert."
look no further	Telling an academic to "look no further" tends to have the opposite effect.
made out of	Just use "made of."
major breakthrough	All breakthroughs are major, so delete "major."
may/might possibly	"Possibly" is redundant—just use "may" or "might."
meaningful	Meaningful in what sense? Use more specific language.
miraculous	Overly emotive for academic writing.
more or less	This phrase is imprecise; be more specific.
mutual cooperation	"Mutual" is redundant—just use "cooperation."
needless to say, it goes without saying	If it's truly needless to say something, don't say it at all.
never before	"Before" is redundant—just use "never."
new innovation/invention	All innovations and inventions are new, so delete "new."
now pending	"Now" is redundant—just use "pending."
on a regular basis	Wordy; try "frequently" or "regularly" instead.
originally created	"Originally" adds nothing here—just use "created."
past experience	"Past" is redundant—just use "experience."
period of time	All periods are "of time," so just use "period."
pick out	Somewhat colloquial; try "highlight" instead.
point out	Somewhat colloquial; try "emphasize" instead.
polar opposites	"Polar" adds nothing to the meaning of this phrase, so just use "opposites."
present an analysis/recommendation/conclusion	Instead of saying you will "present" an analysis/recommendation/conclusion, turn the nouns into verbs: "analyze/recommend/conclude."
present time	"Time" is redundant—just use "present."
prove	Instead of saying something is proven, focus on proving it.
reason why	"Why" is redundant—just use "reason."
refer/reply/revert back	"Back" is not needed in these examples—delete it.
repulsive	Overly emotive for academic writing.
ridiculous	Overly emotive for academic writing.
sensational	Exaggerated language like this feels out of place in an essay and usually has the opposite effect to that intended.
settles the debate	The objective of an essay is to contribute to a debate, not to settle it. This phrase comes across as arrogant and ignorant.
sickening	Overly emotive for academic writing.
and so on, and so forth	Adding "and so on" at the end of a list of examples looks either lazy or like you are trying to pad your essay.
something	Specify what "something" is.
sort of	Replace this with a more specific and formal qualifier.
stuff	Colloquial and vague; specify the stuff you are talking about.
stupid	Insulting people or ideas is rude and inappropriate; if you want to advance an alternative idea, do so using logic.
superb	"Boosters" like this feel out of place in an essay and overusing it will hurt your grades.
take a look at	Instead, use "examine."
talk about	Use "examine" or "discuss" instead.
the first step is to	Wordy; replace with a simple verb such as "start."
make it to	Use "reach" instead.
good, bad	These words risk being subjective.
thoroughly convincing	There is no need to use "thoroughly" here.
time and time again	This colloquial phrase can be deleted from most sentences without changing their meaning.
try to figure out	This is too colloquial for an essay—try a verb like "determine" instead.
unbelievable	This exaggerated, emotional language is not appreciated in an academic context.
undeniable	Saying this makes you look dogmatic.
very, quite, really, totally, actually	These overused modifiers look like padding—examiners hate them.
when it comes to	If you restructure the sentence, you can probably just use "when."
which is	Try deleting "which is" from the phrase "the emu, which is endemic to Australia," and you'll find that your sentence is equally coherent.
who is	Instead of saying "Karen Lee, who is an astronomer," just say "Karen Lee, an astronomer."
with absolute certainty	Saying "with absolute certainty" does not increase the certainty of anything, so work on your argument instead.
within that time frame	"Frame" is redundant—delete it.
without a doubt	Don't assert that something is certain; it is important to be open to new possibilities.

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20+ words to avoid writing in your essay.

Posted on March 13, 2018 by Jessica Velasco

2 Comments

Essays, assignments, admissions…

These words implicate the pain of students from all over the world, don’t you agree? They yet sound like a creepy snake whispering, “You shall not passsss!”

Most students hate writing essays. It’s difficult, time- and energy consuming, and challenging to complete them. A thesis, arguments, references, and conclusion are fundamental to every essay. But what makes yours stellar is words you use to convince readers. Words are your powerful weapon to prove critical thinking and knowledge of the topic. Words help you stand out in a crowd of other students writing about the same topics.

But here’s the problem:

Not all words are useful. Some are clunky and redundant , while others make your writing mumbling. Some you use for word count rather than meaning, and they make essays sound complicated yet empty.

For concise and meaningful writing, do your best to avoid these words and phrases in your admission essays.

1) Contractions

In essays, avoid abbreviations such as “ don’t ,” “ can’t ,” and “ won’t .” Academic works suppose using full words, so write them rather than contractions.

Set phrases enrich a language, but leave them for personal stories, blog posts, or fiction books. An admission essay is a task to check your skills of formal writing, not your ability to entertain or wow professors with flourished vocabulary. Stay clear and concise.

3-5) “ So on ,” “ etc ,” “ and so forth “

These run-on expressions demonstrate nothing but your inability to work with arguments, details, and examples. They scream, “I do not know what else to say!” Avoid them in your essays.

Phrases a la “ it’s an open secret ,” “ we all know ,” or “ sleep like a baby ” are clichés used so often that have lost relevance far long ago. They are a poor attempt to strike as clever, but such words sound false in sober fact.

7-11) “ Thing ,” “ stuff ,” “ good ,” “ bad ,” “ big “

The problem with these words is colloquiality and vagueness, inappropriate for academic language. It’s okay to use them in everyday talk; but when in essays, they sound too elementary and make admission officers think of your poor vocabulary. Do your best to master paraphrasing and synonymization for writing more sophisticated words in academic papers.

12) Slang, jargon, teen speak

Remember the audience. Even though admission officers might read Buzzfeed articles in spare time, they will hardly appreciate such writing style in your formal essay. Leave slang where it’s appropriate.

13) Rhetorical questions

Asking them, you assume that readers know the answer. But why then do they need this information? What’s its value? Rhetorical questions don’t expect explanations, which is inappropriate for academic writing. What seems evident to you might not be so for a reader, that is why you should provide clear statements in essays.

14-17) “ In terms of ,” “ needless to say ,” “ in conclusion ,” “ it goes without saying “

Parenthetic words bring no surplus value to your writings. They may serve as transitional phrases in informal works but become redundant when used in academic essays. Professors will consider it a trick to complete a word count rather than add value to your work.

Quoting and referencing are a must-have for academic essays, but this rule is about starting your work with a quote from a famous person. First, this trick is so overused that drives professors nuts; and second, they want to hear from you, not Hemingway, Musk, or Obama. It’s your essay, so its tone of voice and personality should be yours.

19-26) “ Very ,” “ quite ,” “ really ,” “ totally ,” “ already ,” “ fairly ,” “ actually ,” “ just “

All they are weak modifiers or redundant – ly adverbs with no meaning. When you need to write a 2,000-word essay, you might fight against the temptation to insert them; but the result will be poor because such words are irrelevant and bring no surplus value to the statements you use in essays. “ Very unique ,” “ really interesting ,” and “ quite enough ” have nothing to do with efficient academic writings.

27) Passive voice

Most educators ask students to avoid passive voice because this grammar construction 1) weakens wiring and 2) “ lacks explicit reference to who the actor is .” Use active voice to make all statements clear to readers.

When writing essays, let words be your allies. Use those powerful words to communicate your message to admission officers and overtake other students. Be concise, enhance your vocabulary, consider active verbs and clear sentence structure, and do not plagiarize ideas and texts from peers or online sources. Convey your skills and highlight strengths in your academic writings.

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Academic writing
Taboo words in academic writing

Words and Phrases to Avoid in Academic Writing

Published on February 6, 2016 by Sarah Vinz . Revised on September 11, 2023.

When you are writing a dissertation , thesis, or research paper, many words and phrases that are acceptable in conversations or informal writing are considered inappropriate in academic writing .

You should try to avoid expressions that are too informal, unsophisticated, vague, exaggerated, or subjective, as well as those that are generally unnecessary or incorrect.

Bear in mind, however, that these guidelines do not apply to text you are directly quoting from your sources (including interviews ).

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Too informal, too exaggerated, too subjective, generally incorrect, other interesting articles.

Academic writing is generally more formal than the writing we see in non-academic materials (including on websites). It is also more formal than the ways in which we normally speak. The following words and phrases are considered too informal for a dissertation or academic paper.


A bit	The interviews were difficult to schedule	The interviews were to schedule
A lot of, a couple of	studies	studies
Isn’t, can’t, doesn’t, would’ve (or any other )	The sample	The sample
Kind of, sort of	The findings were significant	The findings were
Til, till	From 2008 2012	From 2008 2012
You, your (i.e., the )	can clearly see the results	can clearly see the results

Informal sentence starts

Some words are acceptable in certain contexts, but become too informal when used at the beginning of a sentence. You can replace these with appropriate transition words or simply remove them from the sentence.


Plus	the participants were in agreement on the third question	, the participants were in agreement on the third question
So	it can be concluded that the model needs further refinement	it can be concluded that the model needs further refinement
And	the participants were all over the age of 30	The participants were all over the age of 30
	we asked all the participants to sign an agreement	, we asked all the participants to sign an agreement

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Using vague terms makes your writing imprecise and may cause people to interpret it in different ways. Always try to be as specific as possible.


Stuff	People are concerned about their	People are concerned about their
Thing	The report presents many	The report presents many
	This topic has interested researchers for	This topic has interested researchers for

Academic writing is usually unadorned and direct. Some adverbs of frequency (such as always and never ) and intensifiers (words that create emphasis, such as really ) are often too dramatic. They may also not be accurate – you’re making a significant claim when you say something is perfect or never happens.

These terms do sometimes add value, but try to use them sparingly.


Always, never	Researchers argue that	Researchers argue that
Perfect	The solution to the problem	to the problem
Really, so, super	This theory is important	This theory is

Some words and phrases reveal your own bias. For instance, if you state that something will obviously happen, you are indicating that you think the occurrence is obvious – not stating a fact.

Expressing your opinion is appropriate in certain sections of a dissertation and in particular types of academic texts (such as personal statements and reflective or argumentative essays ). In most cases, though, take care when using words and phrases such as those below – try to let the facts speak for themselves, or emphasize your point with less biased language.


Beautiful, ugly, wonderful, horrible, great, boring	A review of the literature yielded many articles	A review of the literature yielded many articles
Obviously, naturally, of course	The results indicate	The results indicate

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Certain words and phrases are often used incorrectly, even by native speakers of a language. If you’re exposed to such mistakes often enough, you may start to assume they are correct – but it’s important that you don’t let them creep into your writing.

You should also bear in mind that some of these mistakes relate to things we all frequently mishear (for instance, we often think the speaker is saying would of instead of would have ).


Literally	The students did not understand	The students did not understand
Would of, had of	The study considered	The study considered

In general, you should also try to avoid using words and phrases that fall into the following categories:

Jargon (i.e., “insider” terminology that may be difficult for readers from other fields to understand)
Clichés (i.e., expressions that are heavily overused, such as think outside of the box and at the end of the day )
Everyday abbreviations (e.g., approx. , ASAP, corona, stats, info )
Slang (e.g., cops , cool )
Gender-biased language (e.g., firemen , mankind )
Generally unnecessary (e.g., redundant expressions that do not add meaning, such as compete with each other instead of simply compete)

Reflective reports and personal statements sometimes have a less formal tone. In these types of writing, you may not have to follow these guidelines as strictly. The preface or acknowledgements of a dissertation also often have a less formal and more personal voice than the rest of the document.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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Words and Phrases to Avoid in your College Essays

When it comes to college essays, sometimes the words you choose not to write make just as much of an impact as the words you do choose to write.

Readers get bored with seeing the same old clichés and run-on expressions over and over again. And adding in fluffy language or confusing idioms can leave them feeling lost in your words.

You want your college essay to stand out for all of the right reasons. Avoiding certain words and phrases help make your writing more concise and purposeful.

So how do you know exactly which words and phrases you should avoid in your writing assignments?

To start, you can seek inspiration from college essays that worked for other students. But ultimately it's nice to have a list of what not to do to help you avoid potential mistakes along the way.

What you Should Avoid

1. contractions.

Contractions may seem informal or lazy to the reader. Take the time to write the full phrase out.

NO: It's been a journey.

YES: It has been a journey.

Idioms can be confusing and are often overused. Clearly state what you mean in your own words.

NO: I thought the fancy-looking house was going to be awesome, but all that glitters is not gold .

YES: Even though I thought the new house was going to be incredible with its fancy appliances and enormous windows, I was proven wrong as the appliances all broke within the first week and the windows all leaked.

Also, phrases that introduce idioms are overused. Avoid using phrases like: You know what they say ... But we all know ... As we've heard over and over again ...

Clichés are so... cliché. Everyone is using them, and the words have lost their power. Choose specific and illustrative examples to use so your essay isn't lumped into a pile with all the essays that use worn-out clichés.

NO: I knew I had to give 110% if I was going to win the race.

YES: I knew I needed to train harder than I ever had before—before school, after school, every weekend—if I was going to win the race.

Phrases like “ Every cloud has a silver lining ” and “ Better late than never ” have no place in a creative and original college essay. This is your chance to paint a complete picture of yourself and your personality. Use descriptive language to let the reader hear your voice in your writing instead of an overused, out-of-date expression.

4. Slang and Abbreviations

I hope u r 2 smart to write something like this in a college essay. Abbreviations are not at all acceptable in formal writing such as a college essay.

Also, slang needs to be avoided. Use common language that people of all ages will understand. Remember your audience; you're writing for your professor, not your friends. And tone should reflect that.

NO: The party was lit , and everything was Gucci .

YES: The party was lively, the music was loud and fun, and everyone was having an amazing night.

5. Vague or Elementary Words

Use words that show you're capable of a deeper, more thorough understanding of topics. Avoid words that are vague or simple when there is a better way to demonstrate your meaning.

NO: The thing I read showed that the environment is bad .

YES: The article I studied concluded that the environment had been devastated by the recent occurrences of hurricanes and flooding.

If you find yourself using words like thing, stuff, bad, good, shows, and gives , challenge yourself to replace these words with stronger, more descriptive language.

6. Run-On Expressions

A run-on expression is a phrase, usually at the end of a list, that indicates you could add more examples ( and so on, and so forth, etc. ).

Avoiding filler words and run-on expressions will make your college essay more clear and interesting to the reader.

If something needs to be added to your list of examples, add specific examples. Don't add expressions such as etc. and and so on . These are vague and add nothing of substance to your essay.

NO: I love many sports: basketball, baseball, etc.

YES: I love many sports: basketball, baseball, soccer, tennis, and lacrosse.

7. Filler Words or Weak Modifiers

Increasing your word count by adding filler words will make your essay actually, very, very, very weak.

If you can get rid of a word and it makes no difference to your writing, get rid of it. Or better yet, rephrase it to demonstrate what you truly are trying to convey.

NO: I totally believe that we should actually make the laws much, much more strict very soon.

YES: I believe we should urgently make the laws more strict.

8. Exaggerated Words

Not everything you write about needs to be about the best or the worst . When you exaggerate in writing, it can come off as being insincere. Words like always and perfect also fall into this category.

NO: My team was the best team ever because we always played well and our shots were always perfect .

YES: My team was gifted at the game and played well. We could make some amazing shots.

9. Unnecessary Words

Sometimes writers don't even realize they are adding words that aren't needed. Compare these two examples:

NO: She has got four little puppies.

YES: She has four little puppies.

NO: This lotion helps to smooth the skin.

YES: This lotion helps smooth the skin.

Eliminating unnecessary words makes writing more clear and coherent. This is also an easy way to cut down when you're trying meet a word count requirement .

10. Grammatical Errors, Fragments, and Run-on Sentences

When your college essay draft is complete, make sure to proofread it thoroughly. And have a teacher or talented writer proof it again for you.

Avoid any spelling and grammatical errors, but also avoid fragments and run-on sentences. When it doubt, use an online sentence fragment checker or a grammar checker such as Grammarly to triple-check your work.

Once your draft is complete, make sure you have an excellent proofreader look over your essay for errors.

When writing, choose your words carefully. Pick the words that will make the greatest impact on your message and keep the reader's attention. Avoid the words and phrases that will make your essay weak and boring.

With careful consideration of your word choices, your essays will stand out for all of the right reasons. You'll be submitting advanced writing assignments that will help you ace your coursework!

How to Write Essay Titles and Headers

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33 Words not to use in your Essay

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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There are many types of words not to use in an essay. Today I want to talk to you about just three types. I’ll also provide you with 33 examples of words not to use in your essay to give you an idea of the sorts of words to look out for.

I’ll break these 33 words up into three sets:

Set 1: Exaggerated Words not to use in an Essay

Set 2: assertive words not to use in an essay, set 3: emotional words not to use in an essay.

One major place where many students fall down is that they don’t realize that the ideal essay writing format is very different from other writing styles. If you’re writing like a journalist, blogger, or fiction writer, you’re probably losing yourself marks.

Students keep trying to write essays that excite, engage, and dazzle their marker through exquisitely crafted prose.

That won’t work.

Your marker doesn’t want to be excited or dazzled through Shakespearian verse.

In fact, your marker likely isn’t even reading most of your essay the way you think.

They’re not sitting down with a nice cup of tea for an afternoon of entertainment. Essay marking is serious business. Your marker has a stack of 20, 50, or even 100 assignments to mark over the space of two weekends – weekends when they’d much rather be skiing (trust me, I know this all too well).

Your marker is therefore trying to assess how well you know the information, and whether you’ve presented it in a critical, insightful, and balanced way.

They’re scanning through your work as fast as they can, and those superb adjectives you ummed and ahhhed over for hours are probably irritating the heck out of your frazzled marker .

How Would you Describe your Essay? Focus on being ‘critical’, ‘ insightful ’, and ‘balanced’. Do not make the mistake of trying to be ‘engaging’, ‘exciting’, and ‘entertaining’.

In fact, the more you try to excite or sell a position to your marker through superlative language, the more they’ll roll their eyes.

Your marker is going to make a decision in about the first 3 minutes of their marking what grade they’ll give you. The language you use in the first few paragraphs matters. A lot.

Your marker is going to want to know, in as short a time as possible:

Do they understand the issue?
Have they got a balanced perspective on the issue?
Have they looked at it from several different angles?

With this in mind, you’re going to want to start removing some of those superlative essay words that you’re accustomed to using in your nightly diary.

Here are thirty-three words to stop using. Immediately.

Exaggerated words are words not to use in your essay. Exaggerated language makes you sound like you’re selling your teacher a shoddy used car.

In academia we call these exaggerated words ‘Boosters’, and research shows students who use them too much tend to have lower grades.

Instead, you want to look like you’re very soberly stated the cases for and against a particular point. That same research study noted above highlighted that sober analysis tends to get higher grades.

Therefore, try not to provide the impression that you’ve exaggerated.

One of the biggest mistakes students make when writing an essay is overstating their claims. Students think their goal is to present a powerful exposition that will overwhelmingly convince their marker of one fact or another.

In reality, a truly critical thinker – even in an argumentative or critical essay is critical of both themselves and others.

Therefore, they don’t overstate one side of any argument. Even when they come to a conclusion at the end of their piece, it’s after picking apart the flaws and problems with all sides of an argument.

With this in mind, you don’t want to come across as a snake oil salesman. Here are some over-the-top words you might want to leave out of your next essay:

Amazing Ground Breaking Absolute Best Absolute Worst Thoroughly Convincing Look no Further Miraculous Superb Unbelievable Sensational Exceptional

Similarly, try not to use the most dramatic statistics that don’t seem to pass the common-sense test. If you do identify an overwhelmingly powerful statistic, search for one that seems more grounded or understated.

You can present a seemingly over-the-top statistic alongside a less overwhelming statistic to show that there is disagreement within a topic. Even if both statistics seem to support a statement, present them side-by-side to show how even people who agree on big-picture issues disagree on some of the minor points.

Showing the small differences between different scholarly sources you have read is one of the best ways to show that you have come up with deep, thoughtful, and insightful ‘critical commentary’ about a topic. It also shows that you haven’t gotten carried away believing something wholeheartedly in a way that appears thoughtless.

Read Also: 13+ Examples Of The Word “Academic” In A Sentence

We don’t completely, unequivocally, and unrefutably know anything. Therefore, nothing is ever ‘confirmed’.

Even the ‘Theory’ of gravity is just a theory – and indeed, it’s changed and been updated many, many times since Isaac Newton got hit on the head by that apple.

Indeed, the idea that we never really know something to be completely true forms the basis of university thought. It dates way back to scholars such as Nicolaus Copernicus who, in 1514, proposed that the sun revolved around the earth.

Back then, this was a preposterous assertion! Everyone knew , was absolutely certain , that the earth was the center of the universe. The sun woke up in the morning and went to bed at night – that’s the way the world was.

However, by making observations of the positions of the stars at night, Copernicus showed us that we could observe that it was not the sun that was moving through space – it was us!

Copernicus showed us that we had to let our observations shape our beliefs. Thinking something is true – no matter how much it seems to be! – is not enough. We should always leave our minds open to new ideas.

Copernicus’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, called this new way of thinking skepticism .

Nowadays, students are taught to always be skeptical. We, therefore, aim not to use words that leave no room for new data to emerge to change our minds.

Take a look at some words that are overly certain, and consider replacing them with more skeptical terms:


Confirms	Supports
Knows	Argues
Proves	Identifies
Settles the Debate	Agrees
True Facts	Shows
Irrefutable	Emphasises
Undeniable	Defends
With Absolute Certainty	Current Scientific Consensus
Without a Doubt	Backs Up
Certainly	Reinforces
Incontrovertibly	Highlights

Emotional language is a sign of lack of critical thinking. Emotional words are therefore a big fat red flag for your teacher. You want to make it appear as if you have come to your position in an essay through the use of objective and thoughtful research.

This is very hard when an issue is inherently emotive. I used to teach a course on Child Protection. In this course I found it very difficult to get my students to stop using language like ‘disgusting’, ‘abhorrent’, and ‘repulsive’ to describe abusive behavior towards children.

“Look,” I would tell them, “I know that abusive behavior is disgusting – we all in this room agree on that. But you need to be a professional, objective juror. Explain to me the effects of child abuse through facts and research. Show facts, not feelings. In your essay, keep your emotional language out of it.”

Simply speaking, emotional language makes it appear to your marker that you are susceptible to researcher bias. A more sober analysis will be more much convincing.

Here are some words to avoid at all costs:

Disgusting Beautiful Gorgeous Perfect Repulsive Abhorrent Disagreeable Sickening Absurd Ridiculous Unintelligent Stupid

You might notice I didn’t provide you with possible alternative words in the table above. The reason is simple: remove superlative adjectives and adverbs, and don’t replace them with anything.

Many of my students complain that I’m asking them to be boring . It’s true, to an extent. In essay writing (unlike journalistic or blog writing), you need to take your ‘voice’ out of the writing.

You need to let the way you sorted and presented the data do the talking for you. For some tips on this, you might want to have a look at our post on paragraphs where we outline the ideal paragraph formula to achieve the best results in your essays.

In this post, I have outlined three types of words to avoid in essays , with examples. I have highlighted that you should avoid these three types of words:

Three types of Words to Avoid

Exaggerated Words
Emotional Words
Assertive Words

The above 33 examples are just a start: keep your mind active when editing your work and try to pick out these three types of words.

Essay writing is supposed to be succinct, clear, and to-the-point. It should be analytical and critical. However, it should do this calmly and professionally. By exaggeration, being emotional, and being assertive, you are doing yourself a disservice.

(You might also want to brush up on tautologies so you avoid using them in essays, too!)

By paying attention to your word choice, you can start to build your marks. Sometimes it’s more important to focus on words to avoid than words to include.

Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 60 Would you Rather Questions for Students (Of all Ages)
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 25 Classroom Games Ideas for High School
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 25 Classroom Games Ideas for Middle School
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 25 Classroom Games Ideas (For Elementary School)

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Bad College Essays: 10 Mistakes You Must Avoid

College Essays

Just as there are noteworthy examples of excellent college essays that admissions offices like to publish, so are there cringe-worthy examples of terrible college essays that end up being described by anonymous admissions officers on Reddit discussion boards.

While I won't guarantee that your essay will end up in the first category, I will say that you follow my advice in this article, your essay most assuredly won't end up in the second. How do you avoid writing a bad admissions essay? Read on to find out what makes an essay bad and to learn which college essay topics to avoid. I'll also explain how to recognize bad college essays—and what to do to if you end up creating one by accident.

What Makes Bad College Essays Bad

What exactly happens to turn a college essay terrible? Just as great personal statements combine an unexpected topic with superb execution, flawed personal statements compound problematic subject matter with poor execution.

Problems With the Topic

The primary way to screw up a college essay is to flub what the essay is about or how you've decided to discuss a particular experience. Badly chosen essay content can easily create an essay that is off-putting in one of a number of ways I'll discuss in the next section.

The essay is the place to let the admissions office of your target college get to know your personality, character, and the talents and skills that aren't on your transcript. So if you start with a terrible topic, not only will you end up with a bad essay, but you risk ruining the good impression that the rest of your application makes.

Some bad topics show admissions officers that you don't have a good sense of judgment or maturity , which is a problem since they are building a class of college students who have to be able to handle independent life on campus.

Other bad topics suggest that you are a boring person , or someone who doesn't process your experience in a colorful or lively way, which is a problem since colleges want to create a dynamic and engaged cohort of students.

Still other bad topics indicate that you're unaware of or disconnected from the outside world and focused only on yourself , which is a problem since part of the point of college is to engage with new people and new ideas, and admissions officers are looking for people who can do that.

Problems With the Execution

Sometimes, even if the experiences you discuss could be the foundation of a great personal statement, the way you've structured and put together your essay sends up warning flags. This is because the admissions essay is also a place to show the admissions team the maturity and clarity of your writing style.

One way to get this part wrong is to exhibit very faulty writing mechanics , like unclear syntax or incorrectly used punctuation. This is a problem since college-ready writing is one of the things that's expected from a high school graduate.

Another way to mess this up is to ignore prompt instructions either for creative or careless reasons. This can show admissions officers that you're either someone who simply blows off directions and instructions or someone who can't understand how to follow them . Neither is a good thing, since they are looking for people who are open to receiving new information from professors and not just deciding they know everything already.

College Essay Topics To Avoid

Want to know why you're often advised to write about something mundane and everyday for your college essay? That's because the more out-there your topic, the more likely it is to stumble into one of these trouble categories.

Too Personal

The problem with the overly personal essay topic is that revealing something very private can show that you don't really understand boundaries . And knowing where appropriate boundaries are will be key for living on your own with a bunch of people not related to you.

Unfortunately, stumbling into the TMI zone of essay topics is more common than you think. One quick test for checking your privacy-breaking level: if it's not something you'd tell a friendly stranger sitting next to you on the plane, maybe don't tell it to the admissions office.

Describing losing your virginity, or anything about your sex life really. This doesn't mean you can't write about your sexual orientation—just leave out the actual physical act.
Writing in too much detail about your illness, disability, any other bodily functions. Detailed meaningful discussion of what this physical condition has meant to you and your life is a great thing to write about. But stay away from body horror and graphic descriptions that are simply there for gratuitous shock value.
Waxing poetic about your love for your significant other. Your relationship is adorable to the people currently involved in it, but those who don't know you aren't invested in this aspect of your life.
Confessing to odd and unusual desires of the sexual or illegal variety. Your obsession with cultivating cacti is wonderful topic, while your obsession with researching explosives is a terrible one.

Too Revealing of Bad Judgment

Generally speaking, leave past illegal or immoral actions out of your essay . It's simply a bad idea to give admissions officers ammunition to dislike you.

Some exceptions might be if you did something in a very, very different mindset from the one you're in now (in the midst of escaping from danger, under severe coercion, or when you were very young, for example). Or if your essay is about explaining how you've turned over a new leaf and you have the transcript to back you up.

Writing about committing crime as something fun or exciting. Unless it's on your permanent record, and you'd like a chance to explain how you've learned your lesson and changed, don't put this in your essay.
Describing drug use or the experience of being drunk or high. Even if you're in a state where some recreational drugs are legal, you're a high school student. Your only exposure to mind-altering substances should be caffeine.
Making up fictional stories about yourself as though they are true. You're unlikely to be a good enough fantasist to pull this off, and there's no reason to roll the dice on being discovered to be a liar.
Detailing your personality flaws. Unless you have a great story of coping with one of these, leave deal-breakers like pathological narcissism out of your personal statement.

Too Overconfident

While it's great to have faith in your abilities, no one likes a relentless show-off. No matter how magnificent your accomplishments, if you decide to focus your essay on them, it's better to describe a setback or a moment of doubt rather that simply praising yourself to the skies.

Bragging and making yourself the flawless hero of your essay. This goes double if you're writing about not particularly exciting achievements like scoring the winning goal or getting the lead in the play.
Having no awareness of the actual scope of your accomplishments. It's lovely that you take time to help others, but volunteer-tutoring a couple of hours a week doesn't make you a saintly figure.

Too Clichéd or Boring

Remember your reader. In this case, you're trying to make yourself memorable to an admissions officer who has been reading thousands of other essays . If your essay makes the mistake of being boring or trite, it just won't register in that person's mind as anything worth paying attention to.

Transcribing your resume into sentence form or writing about the main activity on your transcript. The application already includes your resume, or a detailed list of your various activities. Unless the prompt specifically asks you to write about your main activity, the essay needs to be about a facet of your interests and personality that doesn't come through the other parts of the application.
Writing about sports. Every athlete tries to write this essay. Unless you have a completely off-the-wall story or unusual achievement, leave this overdone topic be.
Being moved by your community service trip to a third-world country. Were you were impressed at how happy the people seemed despite being poor? Did you learn a valuable lesson about how privileged you are? Unfortunately, so has every other teenager who traveled on one of these trips. Writing about this tends to simultaneously make you sound unempathetic, clueless about the world, way over-privileged, and condescending. Unless you have a highly specific, totally unusual story to tell, don't do it.
Reacting with sadness to a sad, but very common experience. Unfortunately, many of the hard, formative events in your life are fairly universal. So, if you're going to write about death or divorce, make sure to focus on how you dealt with this event, so the essay is something only you could possibly have written. Only detailed, idiosyncratic description can save this topic.
Going meta. Don't write about the fact that you're writing the essay as we speak, and now the reader is reading it, and look, the essay is right here in the reader's hand. It's a technique that seems clever, but has already been done many times in many different ways.
Offering your ideas on how to fix the world. This is especially true if your solution is an easy fix, if only everyone would just listen to you. Trust me, there's just no way you are being realistically appreciative of the level of complexity inherent in the problem you're describing.
Starting with a famous quotation. There usually is no need to shore up your own words by bringing in someone else's. Of course, if you are writing about a particular phrase that you've adopted as a life motto, feel free to include it. But even then, having it be the first line in your essay feels like you're handing the keys over to that author and asking them to drive.
Using an everyday object as a metaphor for your life/personality. "Shoes. They are like this, and like that, and people love them for all of these reasons. And guess what? They are just like me."

Too Off-Topic

Unlike the essays you've been writing in school where the idea is to analyze something outside of yourself, the main subject of your college essay should be you, your background, your makeup, and your future . Writing about someone or something else might well make a great essay, but not for this context.

Paying tribute to someone very important to you. Everyone would love to meet your grandma, but this isn't the time to focus on her amazing coming of age story. If you do want to talk about a person who is important to your life, dwell on the ways you've been impacted by them, and how you will incorporate this impact into your future.
Documenting how well other people do things, say things, are active, while you remain passive and inactive in the essay. Being in the orbit of someone else's important lab work, or complex stage production, or meaningful political activism is a fantastic learning moment. But if you decide to write about, your essay should be about your learning and how you've been influenced, not about the other person's achievements.
Concentrating on a work of art that deeply moved you. Watch out for the pitfall of writing an analytical essay about that work, and not at all about your reaction to it or how you've been affected since. Check out our explanation of how to answer Topic D of the ApplyTexas application to get some advice on writing about someone else's work while making sure your essay still points back at you.

(Image: Pieter Christoffel Wonder [Public domain] , via Wikimedia Commons)

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Too Offensive

With this potential mistake, you run the risk of showing a lack of self-awareness or the ability to be open to new ideas . Remember, no reader wants to be lectured at. If that's what your essay does, you are demonstrating an inability to communicate successfully with others.

Also, remember that no college is eager to admit someone who is too close-minded to benefit from being taught by others. A long, one-sided essay about a hot-button issue will suggest that you are exactly that.

Ranting at length about political, religious, or other contentious topics. You simply don't know where the admissions officer who reads your essay stands on any of these issues. It's better to avoid upsetting or angering that person.
Writing a one-sided diatribe about guns, abortion, the death penalty, immigration, or anything else in the news. Even if you can marshal facts in your argument, this essay is simply the wrong place to take a narrow, unempathetic side in an ongoing debate.
Mentioning anything negative about the school you're applying to. Again, your reader is someone who works there and presumably is proud of the place. This is not the time to question the admissions officer's opinions or life choices.

College Essay Execution Problems To Avoid

Bad college essays aren't only caused by bad topics. Sometimes, even if you're writing about an interesting, relevant topic, you can still seem immature or unready for college life because of the way you present that topic—the way you actually write your personal statement. Check to make sure you haven't made any of the common mistakes on this list.

Tone-Deafness

Admissions officers are looking for resourcefulness, the ability to be resilient, and an active and optimistic approach to life —these are all qualities that create a thriving college student. Essays that don't show these qualities are usually suffering from tone-deafness.

Being whiny or complaining about problems in your life. Is the essay about everyone doing things to/against you? About things happening to you, rather than you doing anything about them? That perspective is a definite turn-off.
Trying and failing to use humor. You may be very funny in real life, but it's hard to be successfully funny in this context, especially when writing for a reader who doesn't know you. If you do want to use humor, I'd recommend the simplest and most straightforward version: being self-deprecating and low-key.
Talking down to the reader, or alternately being self-aggrandizing. No one enjoys being condescended to. In this case, much of the function of your essay is to charm and make yourself likable, which is unlikely to happen if you adopt this tone.
Being pessimistic, cynical, and generally depressive. You are applying to college because you are looking forward to a future of learning, achievement, and self-actualization. This is not the time to bust out your existential ennui and your jaded, been-there-done-that attitude toward life.

(Image: Eduard Munch [Public Domain] , via Wikimedia Commons)

Lack of Personality

One good question to ask yourself is: could anyone else have written this essay ? If the answer is yes, then you aren't doing a good job of representing your unique perspective on the world. It's very important to demonstrate your ability to be a detailed observer of the world, since that will be one of your main jobs as a college student.

Avoiding any emotions, and appearing robot-like and cold in the essay. Unlike essays that you've been writing for class, this essay is meant to be a showcase of your authorial voice and personality. It may seem strange to shift gears after learning how to take yourself out of your writing, but this is the place where you have to put as much as yourself in as possible.
Skipping over description and specific details in favor of writing only in vague generalities. Does your narrative feel like a newspaper horoscope, which could apply to every other person who was there that day? Then you're doing it wrong and need to refocus on your reaction, feelings, understanding, and transformation.

Off-Kilter Style

There's some room for creativity here, yes, but a college essay isn't a free-for-all postmodern art class . True, there are prompts that specifically call for your most out-of-left-field submission, or allow you to submit a portfolio or some other work sample instead of a traditional essay. But on a standard application, it's better to stick to traditional prose, split into paragraphs, further split into sentences.

Submitting anything other than just the materials asked for on your application. Don't send food to the admissions office, don't write your essay on clothing or shoes, don't create a YouTube channel about your undying commitment to the school. I know there are a lot of urban legends about "that one time this crazy thing worked," but they are either not true or about something that will not work a second time.
Writing your essay in verse, in the form of a play, in bullet points, as an acrostic, or any other non-prose form. Unless you really have a way with poetry or playwriting, and you are very confident that you can meet the demands of the prompt and explain yourself well in this form, don't discard prose simply for the sake of being different.
Using as many "fancy" words as possible and getting very far away from sounding like yourself. Admissions officers are unanimous in wanting to hear your not fully formed teenage voice in your essay. This means that you should write at the top of your vocabulary range and syntax complexity, but don't trade every word up for a thesaurus synonym. Your essay will suffer for it.

Failure to Proofread

Most people have a hard time checking over their own work. This is why you have to make sure that someone else proofreads your writing . This is the one place where you can, should—and really must—get someone who knows all about grammar, punctuation and has a good eye for detail to take a red pencil to your final draft.

Otherwise, you look like you either don't know the basic rules or writing (in which case, are you really ready for college work?) or don't care enough to present yourself well (in which case, why would the admissions people care about admitting you?).

Typos, grammatical mistakes, punctuation flubs, weird font/paragraph spacing issues. It's true that these are often unintentional mistakes. But caring about getting it right is a way to demonstrate your work ethic and dedication to the task at hand.
Going over the word limit. Part of showing your brilliance is being able to work within arbitrary rules and limitations. Going over the word count points to a lack of self-control, which is not a very attractive feature in a college applicant.
Repeating the same word(s) or sentence structure over and over again. This makes your prose monotonous and hard to read.

Bad College Essay Examples—And How to Fix Them

The beauty of writing is that you get to rewrite. So if you think of your essay as a draft waiting to be revised into a better version rather than as a precious jewel that can't bear being touched, you'll be in far better shape to correct the issues that always crop up!

Now let's take a look at some actual college essay drafts to see where the writer is going wrong and how the issue could be fixed.

Essay #1: The "I Am Writing This Essay as We Speak" Meta-Narrative

Was your childhood home destroyed by a landspout tornado? Yeah, neither was mine. I know that intro might have given the impression that this college essay will be about withstanding disasters, but the truth is that it isn't about that at all.

In my junior year, I always had in mind an image of myself finishing the college essay months before the deadline. But as the weeks dragged on and the deadline drew near, it soon became clear that at the rate things are going I would probably have to make new plans for my October, November and December.

Falling into my personal wormhole, I sat down with my mom to talk about colleges. "Maybe you should write about Star Trek ," she suggested, "you know how you've always been obsessed with Captain Picard, calling him your dream mentor. Unique hobbies make good topics, right? You'll sound creative!" I played with the thought in my mind, tapping my imaginary communicator pin and whispering "Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. And then an Essay." Nothing happened. Instead, I sat quietly in my room wrote the old-fashioned way. Days later I emerged from my room disheveled, but to my dismay, this college essay made me sound like just a guy who can't get over the fact that he'll never take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam. So, I tossed my essay away without even getting to disintegrate it with a phaser set on stun.

I fell into a state of panic. My college essay. My image of myself in senior year. Almost out of nowhere, Robert Jameson Smith offered his words of advice. Perfect! He suggested students begin their college essay by listing their achievements and letting their essay materialize from there. My heart lifted, I took his advice and listed three of my greatest achievements - mastering my backgammon strategy, being a part of TREE in my sophomore year, and performing "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from The Pirates of Penzance in public. And sure enough, I felt inspiration hit me and began to type away furiously into the keyboard about my experience in TREE, or Trees Require Engaged Environmentalists. I reflected on the current state of deforestation, and described the dichotomy of it being both understandable why farmers cut down forests for farmland, and how dangerous this is to our planet. Finally, I added my personal epiphany to the end of my college essay as the cherry on the vanilla sundae, as the overused saying goes.

After 3 weeks of figuring myself out, I have converted myself into a piece of writing. As far as achievements go, this was definitely an amazing one. The ability to transform a human being into 603 words surely deserves a gold medal. Yet in this essay, I was still being nagged by a voice that couldn't be ignored. Eventually, I submitted to that yelling inner voice and decided that this was not the right essay either.

In the middle of a hike through Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, I realized that the college essay was nothing more than an embodiment of my character. The two essays I have written were not right because they have failed to become more than just words on recycled paper. The subject failed to come alive. Certainly my keen interest in Star Trek and my enthusiasm for TREE are a great part of who I am, but there were other qualities essential in my character that did not come across in the essays.

With this realization, I turned around as quickly as I could without crashing into a tree.

What Essay #1 Does Well

Here are all things that are working on all cylinders for this personal statement as is.

Killer First Sentence

Was your childhood home destroyed by a landspout tornado? Yeah, neither was mine.

A strange fact. There are different kinds of tornadoes? What is a "landspout tornado" anyway?
A late-night-deep-thoughts hypothetical. What would it be like to be a kid whose house was destroyed in this unusual way?
Direct engagement with the reader. Instead of asking "what would it be like to have a tornado destroy a house" it asks "was your house ever destroyed."

Gentle, Self-Deprecating Humor That Lands Well

I played with the thought in my mind, tapping my imaginary communicator pin and whispering "Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. And then an Essay." Nothing happened. Instead, I sat quietly in my room wrote the old-fashioned way. Days later I emerged from my room disheveled, but to my dismay, this college essay made me sound like just a guy who can't get over the fact that he'll never take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam. So, I tossed my essay away without even getting to disintegrate it with a phaser set on stun.

The author has his cake and eats it too here: both making fun of himself for being super into the Star Trek mythos, but also showing himself being committed enough to try whispering a command to the Enterprise computer alone in his room. You know, just in case.

A Solid Point That Is Made Paragraph by Paragraph

The meat of the essay is that the two versions of himself that the author thought about portraying each fails in some way to describe the real him. Neither an essay focusing on his off-beat interests, nor an essay devoted to his serious activism could capture everything about a well-rounded person in 600 words.

(Image: fir0002 via Wikimedia Commons .)

Where Essay #1 Needs Revision

Rewriting these flawed parts will make the essay shine.

Spending Way Too Long on the Metanarrative

I know that intro might have given the impression that this college essay will be about withstanding disasters, but the truth is that it isn't about that at all.

Look at how long and draggy these paragraphs are, especially after that zippy opening. Is it at all interesting to read about how someone else found the process of writing hard? Not really, because this is a very common experience.

In the rewrite, I'd advise condensing all of this to maybe a sentence to get to the meat of the actual essay .

Letting Other People Do All the Doing

I sat down with my mom to talk about colleges. "Maybe you should write about Star Trek ," she suggested, "you know how you've always been obsessed with Captain Picard, calling him your dream mentor. Unique hobbies make good topics, right? You'll sound creative!"

Almost out of nowhere, Robert Jameson Smith offered his words of advice. Perfect! He suggested students begin their college essay by listing their achievements and letting their essay materialize from there.

Twice in the essay, the author lets someone else tell him what to do. Not only that, but it sounds like both of the "incomplete" essays were dictated by the thoughts of other people and had little to do with his own ideas, experiences, or initiative.

In the rewrite, it would be better to recast both the Star Trek and the TREE versions of the essay as the author's own thoughts rather than someone else's suggestions . This way, the point of the essay—taking apart the idea that a college essay could summarize life experience—is earned by the author's two failed attempts to write that other kind of essay.

Leaving the Insight and Meaning Out of His Experiences

Both the Star Trek fandom and the TREE activism were obviously important life experiences for this author—important enough to be potential college essay topic candidates. But there is no description of what the author did with either one, nor any explanation of why these were so meaningful to his life.

It's fine to say that none of your achievements individually define you, but in order for that to work, you have to really sell the achievements themselves.

In the rewrite, it would be good to explore what he learned about himself and the world by pursuing these interests . How did they change him or seen him into the person he is today?

Not Adding New Shades and Facets of Himself Into the Mix

So, I tossed my essay away without even getting to disintegrate it with a phaser set on stun.

Yet in this essay, I was still being nagged by a voice that couldn't be ignored. Eventually, I submitted to that yelling inner voice and decided that this was not the right essay either.

In both of these passages, there is the perfect opportunity to point out what exactly these failed versions of the essay didn't capture about the author . In the next essay draft, I would suggest subtly making a point about his other qualities.

For example, after the Star Trek paragraph, he could talk about other culture he likes to consume, especially if he can discuss art forms he is interested in that would not be expected from someone who loves Star Trek .

Or, after the TREE paragraph, the author could explain why this second essay was no better at capturing him than the first. What was missing? Why is the self in the essay shouting—is it because this version paints him as an overly aggressive activist?

Essay #2: The "I Once Saw Poor People" Service Trip Essay

Unlike other teenagers, I'm not concerned about money, or partying, or what others think of me. Unlike other eighteen year-olds, I think about my future, and haven't become totally materialistic and acquisitive. My whole outlook on life changed after I realized that my life was just being handed to me on a silver spoon, and yet there were those in the world who didn't have enough food to eat or place to live. I realized that the one thing that this world needed more than anything was compassion; compassion for those less fortunate than us.

During the summer of 2006, I went on a community service trip to rural Peru to help build an elementary school for kids there. I expected harsh conditions, but what I encountered was far worse. It was one thing to watch commercials asking for donations to help the unfortunate people in less developed countries, yet it was a whole different story to actually live it. Even after all this time, I can still hear babies crying from hunger; I can still see the filthy rags that they wore; I can still smell the stench of misery and hopelessness. But my most vivid memory was the moment I first got to the farming town. The conditions of it hit me by surprise; it looked much worse in real life than compared to the what our group leader had told us. Poverty to me and everyone else I knew was a foreign concept that people hear about on the news or see in documentaries. But this abject poverty was their life, their reality. And for the brief ten days I was there, it would be mine too. As all of this realization came at once, I felt overwhelmed by the weight of what was to come. Would I be able to live in the same conditions as these people? Would I catch a disease that no longer existed in the first world, or maybe die from drinking contaminated water? As these questions rolled around my already dazed mind, I heard a soft voice asking me in Spanish, "Are you okay? Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?" I looked down to see a small boy, around nine years of age, who looked starved, and cold, wearing tattered clothing, comforting me. These people who have so little were able to forget their own needs, and put those much more fortunate ahead of themselves. It was at that moment that I saw how selfish I had been. How many people suffered like this in the world, while I went about life concerned about nothing at all?

Thinking back on the trip, maybe I made a difference, maybe not. But I gained something much more important. I gained the desire to make the world a better place for others. It was in a small, poverty-stricken village in Peru that I finally realized that there was more to life than just being alive.

What Essay #2 Does Well

Let's first point out what this draft has going for it.

Clear Chronology

This is an essay that tries to explain a shift in perspective. There are different ways to structure this overarching idea, but a chronological approach that starts with an earlier opinion, describes a mind changing event, and ends with the transformed point of view is an easy and clear way to lay this potentially complex subject out.

(Image: User:Lite via Wikimedia Commons)

Where Essay #2 Needs Revision

Now let's see what needs to be changed in order for this essay to pass muster.

Condescending, Obnoxious Tone

This is a very broad generalization, which doesn't tend to be the best way to formulate an argument—or to start an essay. It just makes this author sound dismissive of a huge swath of the population.

In the rewrite, this author would be way better off just concentrate on what she want to say about herself, not pass judgment on "other teenagers," most of whom she doesn't know and will never meet.

I realized that the one thing that this world needed more than anything was compassion; compassion for those less fortunate than us.

Coming from someone who hasn't earned her place in the world through anything but the luck of being born, the word "compassion" sounds really condescending. Calling others "less fortunate" when you're a senior in high school has a dehumanizing quality to it.

These people who have so little were able to forget their own needs, and put those much more fortunate in front of themselves.

Again, this comes across as very patronizing. Not only that, but to this little boy the author was clearly not looking all that "fortunate"—instead, she looked pathetic enough to need comforting.

In the next draft, a better hook could be making the essay about the many different kinds of shifting perspectives the author encountered on that trip . A more meaningful essay would compare and contrast the points of view of the TV commercials, to what the group leader said, to the author's own expectations, and finally to this child's point of view.

Vague, Unobservant Description

Phrases like "cries of the small children from not having enough to eat" and "dirt stained rags" seem like descriptions, but they're really closer to incurious and completely hackneyed generalizations. Why were the kids were crying? How many kids? All the kids? One specific really loud kid?

The same goes for "filthy rags," which is both an incredibly insensitive way to talk about the clothing of these villagers, and again shows a total lack of interest in their life. Why were their clothes dirty? Were they workers or farmers so their clothes showing marks of labor? Did they have Sunday clothes? Traditional clothes they would put on for special occasions? Did they make their own clothes? That would be a good reason to keep wearing clothing even if it had "stains" on it.

The rewrite should either make this section more specific and less reliant on cliches, or should discard it altogether .

The conditions of it hit me by surprise; it looked much worse in real life than compared to the what our group leader had told us. Poverty to me and everyone else I knew was a foreign concept that people hear about on the news or see in documentaries. But this abject poverty was their life, their reality.

If this is the "most vivid memory," then I would expect to read all the details that have been seared into the author's brain. What did their leader tell them? What was different in real life? What was the light like? What did the houses/roads/grass/fields/trees/animals/cars look like? What time of day was it? Did they get there by bus, train, or plane? Was there an airport/train station/bus terminal? A city center? Shops? A marketplace?

There are any number of details to include here when doing another drafting pass.

Lack of Insight or Maturity

But this abject poverty was their life, their reality. And for the brief ten days I was there, it would be mine too. As all of this realization came at once, I felt overwhelmed by the weight of what was to come. Would I be able to live in the same conditions as these people? Would I catch a disease that no longer existed in the first world, or maybe die from drinking contaminated water?

Without a framing device explaining that this initial panic was an overreaction, this section just makes the author sound whiny, entitled, melodramatic, and immature . After all, this isn't a a solo wilderness trek—the author is there with a paid guided program. Just how much mortality is typically associated with these very standard college-application-boosting service trips?

In a rewrite, I would suggest including more perspective on the author's outsized and overprivileged response here. This would fit well with a new focus on the different points of view on this village the author encountered.

Unearned, Clichéd "Deep Thoughts"

But I gained something much more important. I gained the desire to make the world a better place for others. It was in a small, poverty-stricken village in Peru that I finally realized that there was more to life than just being alive.

Is it really believable that this is what the author learned? There is maybe some evidence to suggest that the author was shaken somewhat out of a comfortable, materialistic existence. But what does "there is more to life than just being alive" even really mean? This conclusion is rather vague, and seems mostly a non sequitur.

In a rewrite, the essay should be completely reoriented to discuss how differently others see us than we see ourselves, pivoting on the experience of being pitied by someone who you thought was pitiable. Then, the new version can end by on a note of being better able to understand different points of view and other people's perspectives .

The Bottom Line

Bad college essays have problems either with their topics or their execution.
The essay is how admissions officers learn about your personality, point of view, and maturity level, so getting the topic right is a key factor in letting them see you as an aware, self-directed, open-minded applicant who is going to thrive in an environment of independence.
The essay is also how admissions officers learn that you are writing at a ready-for-college level, so screwing up the execution shows that you either don't know how to write, or don't care enough to do it well.
The main ways college essay topics go wrong is bad taste, bad judgment, and lack of self-awareness.
The main ways college essays fail in their execution have to do with ignoring format, syntax, and genre expectations.

What's Next?

Want to read some excellent college essays now that you've seen some examples of flawed one? Take a look through our roundup of college essay examples published by colleges and then get help with brainstorming your perfect college essay topic .

Need some guidance on other parts of the application process? Check out our detailed, step-by-step guide to college applications for advice.

Are you considering taking the SAT or ACT again before you submit your application? Read about our famous test prep guides for hints and strategies for a better score.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download them for free now:

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Words to Avoid in Academic Writing

November 3, 2022 | Blog

Cheat sheet

No time to read? Here’s the short version:

Academic writing is comparatively formal. To improve the tone of your paper, avoid the following expressions, which are seen as out of place in academic writing:


	informal expressions
	vague expressions
	exaggerations
	opinionated or subjective expressions
	clichés
	fillers
	contractions
	the first or second person
	jargon
	gendered language	or when referring to people of all genders

Informal and colloquial writing

Academic writing is more formal than other kinds of writing. Some words or expressions that may be acceptable in emails, blog posts, or text messages are too informal for academic contexts and may come across as unsophisticated. Here are some informal and colloquial words to avoid in academic writing.


America	the United States, the US, the USA	The study focused on the United States.
bad	poor, negative	The results were poor.
big, humongous, huge	large, sizeable, significant	A significant amount of evidence supports this theory.
has got	has, must	The senator said that the government act.
get, got	receive	The writer received a prize for her work.
give	provide, offer, present	Table 5.2 provides evidence to support this conclusion.
good	optimal, strong, prime (or replace with a more descriptive adjective)	The findings were optimal.
kind of, sort of	somewhat, to some degree, in the category of	The scholar somewhat agreed.
till	until, to, through	The study will run from March until May.
show	demonstrate, reveal, illustrate	The interviews revealed a shared concern over safety.

Vague writing

Academic writing should be as precise as possible. Unambiguous language strengthens papers, while vague wording leaves too much to a reader’s interpretation. Whenever possible, prefer exact values—percentages, measurements, statistics—to broader terms. Here are some imprecise words to avoid in academic writing.


a bit	Specify the exact amount.	The experiment required 10 mg of catalyst.
a couple of/some	Specify the exact amount or replace with .	were surveyed.
a lot of, lots of	Specify the exact amount or replace with , , or .	The announcement received significant attention.
a ton	Specify the exact amount or replace with , , or .	The government spent $5 million on the project.
and so on	Either finish the thought, eliminate the phrase, or replace with a more specific phrase like or .	Civil engineers must consider load, terrain, weather and many other factors when designing a bridge.
anything, something	Specify the item(s).	The writer could be referencing anything. The writer could be referencing
nice	Specify the quality.	It was a colourful painting.
most	Specify the amount or replace with or .	scientists support the measure.
stuff, thing	Specify the item(s), or replace with or .	The report included lots of stuff. The report included .

Exaggerations

Academic writing should allow for reasonable doubt. While academic writers can be confident, they must acknowledge that their ideas and theories may be disproven. Avoid language that suggests absolute authority or knowledge.

Superlatives, such as largest and best , should be used only if they refer to provable facts (for example, describing a company as the largest in Europe) or if the writer is quoting another source (for example, saying that Rolling Stone ranked a certain recording as the best single of 2018).


always	Specify the amount or replace with the word .	The results were always the same. The results were .
definitely, absolutely	Eliminate or replace with , or .	The findings provide significant support for the proposed legislation.
every	Specify the amount or add a phrase to convey reasonable doubt, such as or .	Every species of this genus is found in the Brazilian Amazon.
never	Specify the amount or replace with the word .	Surveyed respondents never chose the fourth option. surveyed respondents chose the fourth option
none	Specify the amount or add a phrase to convey reasonable doubt, such as , , or .	.
proves, proof		This finding supports the hypothesis.

Too subjective or opinionated

In academic writing, arguments must be supported by evidence. Avoid words that imply conclusions based on the writer’s personal opinions; use objective language to support the main argument. Here are some subjective words to avoid in academic writing.


beautiful, wonderful, awful, ugly, hideous	Specify the quality as objectively as possible.	The composition was full of clashing movements. The building was artfully designed.
better	Replace with a more objective word or phrase.	The candidate had a more comprehensive plan to address climate change than his opponent.
clearly, naturally, of course, obviously, undoubtedly	Eliminate or replace with a more objective word.	The programmer wrote the application in Java. After the war, economic policy changed.
perfect, ideal, best	Replace with a more specific qualifier or the words or .	The applicant was a strong candidate.
should	Explain the rationale behind the recommendation.	Activists should study the protest. Activists the protest.

Clichés and colloquialisms

Clichés are overused expressions, while colloquialisms are those patterns of expression typical of informal speech. Besides making a paper appear too informal or conversational, they suggest that the writer doesn’t have a clear idea of what she’s trying to say. Replacing such phrases with more precise language will help improve the tone of your writing. Here are some clichés that are best avoided in academic writing.


a happy medium		The two sides reached compromise.
a stumbling block		The proposal encountered an obstacle when the opposing party mounted a negative press campaign.
above board		Unlike previous proposals, the resolution was legitimate.
at the end of the day, when all is said and done	or	, the new law did not impact the rural population.
get through	Replace with a more specific verb or use or .	The researcher had to read multiple texts.
in this day and age, in recent years	Specify the time period or use , , or .	, social media use has become prevalent amongst millennials.
think outside the box	Specify the idea or replace with words like and .	The economist was known to outside the box propose innovative ideas.

Some words or phrases are superfluous in academic writing, and sentences tend to be stronger when they are removed. These filler words are best avoided in academic writing.


literally	Eliminate entirely unless you mean ‘in a literal manner.’	The scientist had explored every option. The politician’s remarks were not intended to be interpreted .
really, too	Eliminate or specify the quality.	The results were revealing.
serves to, helps to	Eliminate entirely.	This quote illustrates the author’s primary argument.
so	Eliminate entirely or replace with a more specific word.	The poem is interesting because it uses an unusual rhyme pattern.
very, extremely	Eliminate the word or replace with .	Her testimony was useful. Her testimony was .

Contractions

Contractions are the result of combining two words into one word, with the omitted letters shown with an apostrophe. For example, don’t is a contraction of do not . Contractions give writing an air of informality, and careful writers avoid them in academic writing.


can’t, won’t, don’t, didn’t		The two substances did not react.
shouldn’t, wouldn’t		He would not support the vote.
it’s		a common misunderstanding.
I’d, I’ve, we’ve, she’s		incapable of deceit.

Language to consider carefully

First or second person.

The first person (I/we/my/our) is not always deemed acceptable in academic papers. Consult the style guide used in your field; while you may be able to use the first person in some sections, such as the Acknowledgements, you may need to amend this in the Methods and Results sections.

The second person (you/your) is almost never used in academic writing, though it may be appropriate in creative writing or personal communication. Remember that the second person also includes commands, such as add 10 ml to the solution . In most cases, the best way to avoid the second person is to restructure the sentence.

First person:

I/we/my/our

Replace with a third-person actor ( ) or rewrite the sentence passively.

I performed a regression analysis.

A regression analysis .

performed a regression analysis.

Second person: you/your

Restructure the sentence or replace with a neutral term like or .

You might think that this result is unlikely.

The result .

under the circumstances.

the result unlikely.

One aspect of academic writing that can prove particularly problematic is jargon. Academic writing is full of terms of art, and while these are often unavoidable, you should consider your audience when writing your text. It’s important to choose appropriate subject-specific terminology, of course, but remember that your ultimate goal is for as many readers as possible to read and understand your paper. To further that goal, introduce complex or industry-specific terms with clear definitions.


Aneuploidy	The presence of an abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell.	In this study, researchers reviewed the causes of aneuploidy, namely, the presence of an abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell.
Demurrer	A written response in which the defendant seeks dismissal of an allegation due to insufficient grounds.	The party against whom a complaint has been filed may object by demurrer—a legal document in which the defendant requests dismissal of an allegation due to insufficient grounds.

Gendered language

Replace gendered language with gender-neutral alternatives to avoid perpetuating gender bias.


man, mankind		The wheel is one of humanity’s earliest inventions.
professional designations that end in or such as or , – , such as , or – such as	Replace with gender-neutral words.	, , , ,
, in reference to women, such as	Replace with gender-neutral terms.	The reporter warned viewers of the approach of a vicious cold snap.

The drive to reduce bias and improve inclusion has led to the formulation of guidelines by many academic publishers. For detailed guidance on the types of language that we should avoid in academic writing, see our guide to inclusive language .

For much more detail on problematic terms and preferred alternatives, see the APA’s inclusive language guide , the AMA’s guide to advancing equity in writing , and the OXFAM guidance on inclusive language .

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Words that You Should Never Use in Essay

Every writer wants his essay to be a brilliant piece of writing not only free from grammatical and spelling errors but also free from redundant and boring words. Writing an essay is a complex process that requires brainstorming and editing. This article will give useful tips on how to write a good essay, and avoid the unnecessary boring words that spoil the positive impression of the writing.

Once your paper is ready, check it once more to make sure you do not have too many repetitions. Repetitive words should be replaced with synonyms. Thus you can achieve a stronger vocabulary part that will definitely add points to your writing. Besides, avoid plain words that are characteristic of daily speech rather than academic writing. Try to use more sophisticated vocabulary.

Some lexical units are considered to be the words to avoid in an essay or any other academic work. Whether you are a student who has to submit a project or an entrepreneur obliged to prepare a business document, you need to be aware of the words that should not be used in writing. Certainly, there are some exceptions. For example, you may use colloquial words or jargon in your text if it is allowed by the instructions. Though such situations occur rarely, it is better to know the words that should not be used in writing. For example, avoid such words in essay writing:

Think (you can replace it with argue, brainstorm, consider, suppose, find, analyze);
Big (replace with huge, immense, large, colossal, considerable, substantial, vast, gigantic)
Do (perform, accomplish, achieve, act, execute, finish, complete, conclude)
Very (this word amplifies the writing. You may find better solutions like immensely, inconsiderably. The word very could be used as an adjective with the meaning exact. For instance, “The very moment of the speech was brilliant”)
Good (superb, satisfactory, marvelous, excellent, exceptional, wonderful, favorable)
Bad (poor quality, sad, unacceptable, inferior, deficient, imperfect).
Interesting (one of the most boring words in English. Replace with fascinating, alluring, compelling, curious, impressive, engaging)
Thing (if you write about certain thing, it has a denomination. What is it: day, bag, literature, music, or sentence?)
Get (use: acquire, receive, gain, earn, obtain, score, win).
Nice (polite, brilliant, useful, superior, winning).

In addition, there is a list of the banned phrases that make our essay sound unprofessional. Try to avoid these phrases:

"In order to". You can just "write to".
"Due to the fact that". Use "because".
"Each and every". It is possible to use "each or every", but not the combination of both.
"Equally as". This phrase is grammatically incorrect. You can write "equally exceptional as" or "as exceptional as", but not "equally as exceptional".
"As to whether". Just use "whether".
"In terms of".
"Lots or lots of". Replace with many, tones, much.
"Kind of, sort of". Those phrases are good for informal conversations. But, try to avoid in academic writing.
"Point in time". This phrase is a tautology. Use "at this time" or "at this point".
"Nature". Usually this word is redundant. Person of a mild nature is just a mild person.
"Plus". Plus cannot be used as conjunction. Use "and" instead.
"Try and do". Write "try to do".
"So as to". Replace with "to".
"On account of". Use "because".
"Anything", "something", "nothing" and all words ending-thing. Try to avoid and give exact specification of an object.
"Really". Just omit in formal writing.
"What I mean to say". Write: "I suppose", "I consider", "my ideas is".
"The point I am trying to make". Omit this phrase and replace with "My point is"
"So on and so forth". Omit.
"Play a role". This is a slang phrase. Replace with "is" or "becomes".
"Nowadays", "in today’s society", "in today’s world", "at the present time". Use "today" or "now".
Avoid contractions. Instead of "haven’t" write "have not", instead of "can’t" write "cannot".
"As far as I am concerned". Omit this phrase.
"As a matter of fact", "all things considered". Omit.
"For the purpose of". Replace with "for".
"Because of the fact of", "by virtue of the fact". Omit this redundant phrase. Just write "because".
"In a very real sense", "in reality". Omit.

Remember these phrases and words and omit them in your writing! Use more sophisticated and impressive words to compose the good essay and score the highest grade!

To make sure that your work is coherent and clear, you need to pay attention to the words to avoid in academic writing.

Contractions Such contracted forms as “can’t,” “won’t” are regarded as the words to avoid in an essay as well as any other academic paper. When producing scholarly projects, full forms of words are to be utilized.
Idiomatic expressions Without doubt, set expressions make the language richer, but they should be left for blog posts, fiction stories, etc. As to the papers written in academic style, they should not include any words or phrases used just for entertaining readers. Clarity is what matters.
Hackneyed words The expressions like “it is as clear as a day,” “let’s face it” are the clichés that are applied so frequently that they have lost their pertinence. The use of these words is just a vain attempt to pretend to be smart.
Jargon and slang Mind the readers. It is clear that the members of the admission board read different funny articles. However, they will hardly approve the use of slang and jargon in admission essays. Remember that these lexical units are the words to avoid in writing admission or any other academic works.
Rhetorical questions By asking these questions, you show that the response is known to readers. In such a case why would they read your work? Rhetorical questions do not require any explanations what is unacceptable for scholarly writing since it demands complete clarity meaning each statement has to be explained.
Quotations Quotes also belong to the group called “words not to use in an essay.” Certainly, inserting quotations in the text and making references is essential. Nonetheless, your work cannot start with a quote written by a well-known person as your professor what to read your paper written in your own style.
Passive voice The majority of professors ask their students not to apply passive voice constructions for two reasons: 1. it makes writing weak, 2. it makes writing sound confusing. To make everything clear, active voice is to be used.

Use your own tone and style when producing essays. Be specific and construct clear sentences. Avoid plagiarism! Can you use “you” in an essay? There are certainly the types of papers where you may use this pronoun, but it is better to clarify the issue with your professor before starting writing.

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Words to Avoid in Essay for Effective Writing

Table of Contents

Essays require a lot of thought and are a great way to have a voice in whatever you are discussing. However, a word or phrase can make or break an essay.

This article provides a guide on words not to use in an essay . Avoiding these words will make all the difference.

An essay is a specific kind of academic writing that must demonstrate the ability to express ideas clearly and efficiently (and convincingly). An effective way to demonstrate critical thinking and knowledge is by using appropriate words.

When you’re writing an essay, you should avoid using words that make your writing unclear and less effective. It is essential to use appropriate words in your article, as a sloppy or poorly written piece may confuse or annoy readers.

Avoid these words and phrases in your essays for concise and meaningful writing.

1. Contractions

Contractions are typically used to shorten words. Not writing in contractions can be difficult at first because your writing may sound too formal. However, this is a good thing because your essay will have a polished look and be taken more seriously by your reader.

Using total words instead of contractions also shows that you are a more advanced writer. Words like ‘ don’t, shouldn’t, isn’t ‘ should be wholly avoided in your essay.

Idioms are words that have specific meanings and are typical in informal writings. These words are not suitable for essays as they might confuse people who aren’t familiar with their meanings.

Phrases like ‘ Get a taste of your own medicine’ might not make sense to some readers. You might want to choose words that are easy to understand.

3. Rhetorical questions

Rhetorical questions are without grammatical or structural significance and are often used for conversational purposes.

When used in essay writing, they make your paper seem immature, disorganized, and unprofessional. Questions like ‘ do we want our planet to survive ‘ don’t require a logical answer. It is best to avoid them.

4. Passive Voice

Passive voices do not explicitly identify who the actor in a sentence is. It is best to avoid them in your essay as they seem less professional. Instead, use an active voice to make your points and make a clear connection with your audience.

5. Unnecessary Words

You must keep a consistent tone and use concise and appropriate words when you write an essay. If your comments start to become repetitive and the reader has to read through multiple passages repeatedly, you may want to revise the essay.

Avoid using words that add no meaning to your writing. Unnecessary words and phrases tend to make your essay sound inauthentic and fake, which could be the first shot at turning away readers. For example:

Instead of : This research serves to explain

Use : This research explains

6.Too Subjective Words

You might want to give your opinion about a specific subject, which is great in certain types of essays (such as personal statements). In other cases, describing the information in a way that seems more subjective than objective should be avoided.

Using words like “ I think ” and “ I believe ” would seem like you are trying to claim the scope of the argument. In most cases, it is better to use words like “ It seems ,” or “ It is reasonable to believe “.

Clichés are tedious and overused words. It can be a pain to read someone else’s writing filled with clichés. Avoiding these words in your essay will increase your chances of impressing your readers and improving your grade. Furthermore, clichéd phrases can quickly break the flow of your essay and make it seem as if you are falling back on old grounds.

8. Slang and Jargon

Slangs and jargon are among the top words you should avoid in any writing project.

They often confuse and alter the context of your statement and appear silly and unprofessional. Focus on phrases that serve the purpose of your writing without affecting its tone and progression.

9. Too Exaggerated Words

Avoid using words that are too exaggerated so as not to sound overbearing. It would be best to avoid words like “ sure ,” “ absolutely ,” “ obviously ,” “of course,” “absolutely,” “perfectly,” or adjectives like “brilliant,” “wonderful,” and “terrific.” These words are used for emphasis but are often dramatic. They will indeed sound out of place in your essay.

10. Too Sophisticated

It is essential to avoid using excessively sophisticated words that may come across as a certain level of “sophistication” to the reader. Words like “annihilating,” “blitzkrieg,” “dead space,” “prophetically,” and “silent maestro,” which are too over the top, should be avoided.

Stick to words that are simple and precise. The words you choose can contribute to how your essay is received.

person writing on brown wooden table near white ceramic mug

Remember that your essay is not just a piece of writing, but it also serves as an example to the reader. Be conscious of the tone. Language choices can be significant, so don’t be too informal, serious, or ambiguous .

Keep the tone of your essay appropriate. The use of vocabulary can be a good test for a high-quality composition. This article should guide you on the words not to use in an essay .

Pam is an expert grammarian with years of experience teaching English, writing and ESL Grammar courses at the university level. She is enamored with all things language and fascinated with how we use words to shape our world.

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17 Weak Words to Avoid in Your Writing

Want to make your writing a little stronger? Check out these 17 words to avoid!

Exact Words to Avoid

1. “really,” “very”

These words are usually unnecessary and can be cut out. If you need a stronger adjective, find one rather than adding “really” or “very” to it. (Exception: can be used sparingly in dialogue because it makes a character more realistic.)

2. “just”

“Just” is another word similar to “really” and, for the most part, should be deleted.

3. “that”

In general, beginning authors use too many of this word in their writing. Even old pros often search this word during the editing process to delete those that are unnecessary. Deleting extra words strengths your work.

4. “totally,” “completely,” “absolutely”

Like the previous words, these words don’t add to the sentence and can often be removed. Try using actions to show the feelings instead.

5. “thing,” “it”

“Thing” is vague and weak. Instead, replace “thing” with whatever you are talking about. Do the same with it. Unless you’ve already used the object you’re talking about in the sentence, don’t use the word “it.”

6. “there was”

Instead of starting of a sentence with the words “there was,” try rewording to put the action back in.

7. “as” used as a subordinate conjunction

“As” is confusing to the reader since it has two meanings: it can show that two things are happening at the same time, or it can show one thing is happening because of the other. Instead of using “as” for the second meaning, use the word “because” or “since” to make the meaning clear.

8. “down” or “up”

When used with a verb, these two words are usually unnecessary. For example, “He sat down on the dirty floor” should instead be “He sat on the dirty floor.”

9. “armed” in “armed gunman”

If the person is a gunman, then they are armed. Again, be careful to avoid redundant phrases.

10. “brief” in “brief moment”

All moments are brief; that’s why they’re moments.

11. “have got”

Avoid “got” where possible. Instead of saying “have got,” just use “have.” And actually, “got” isn’t a very useful word in any situation. Consider using the word sparingly. Instead of “She got to her feet,” you can say, “She leapt/jumped/climbed/hurried to her feet.” Anything to show better action.

12. “then” and “next”

When used to describe a sequence of events, these words are weak transitions. Sometimes you can remove the word without consequence; other times, you need to rewrite the sentence to show the sequence through action. For more examples, please see our post Make Your Book Stronger by Avoiding “Then.”

13. “literally”

Is it actually literal? Avoid this word unless using it in dialogue (and even then it can get old fast).

Types of Words to Avoid

14. be-verbs

Be-verbs (was, is, are, were, etc.) are weak and boring. Instead try to use action verbs. Especially avoid be-verbs paired with -ing verbs when they aren’t needed. For a simple example: “She was running through the forest when she tripped on a raised tree root” can be changed to “She ran through the forest and tripped on a raised tree root” or “Running through the forest, she tripped over a raise tree root and sprawled on the ground.” You get the idea!

Note, though, that sometimes a be-verb is what you need. We only advise that you avoid them when you can, without writing an awkward construction.

15. -ly adverbs

When you use -ly adverbs, you are telling instead of showing (which, in case you haven’t heard, is bad). Use -ly adverbs sparingly when writing fiction and instead, describe an action! We talk about this more in our post on dialogue tags (tip # 7) .

16. “shrug,” “nod,” “reach,” “grin,” “sigh,” or any dialogue beats you overuse

We’re not telling you to not use these words. These words are examples of dialogue beats that often get overused , but each author has their own habits and their own words. Are your characters always shrugging, grinning, or sighing? Find out what words you overuse and try to edit some of them out—those listed here can get you started.

17. Nominalizations

A nominalization is when you take a verb or adjective and turn it into noun, making the sentence wordier and even pretentious. This includes words like accuracy, intention, disagreement, slowness, analysis, collection, and suggestion. When possible, turn that noun back into its original verb or adjective form (like accurate, intend, disagree, slow, analyze, collect, and suggest).

What words are on your “words to avoid” list? We’d love to hear in the comments below!

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We all get very attached to what we’ve written, which is precisely why they call it “Killing Your Darlings.” One of the best ways to deal with this attachment issue is to get distance from your writing by letting it sit for a while.

This article is a lifesaver! I only write for fun but since I like to post my little snippets and drafts, I want my small audience to stay engaged. I have this bookmarked and try to check every piece according to this guide, so it’s appreciated!

What about the word: “try”

We are trying to teach ….. Why not say “we teach….”

I definitely have a problem with sighing and nodding. My characters also seem to frown quite a lot! One thing that you mention is ‘down’ etc. I find when reading, that many writers overuse prepositions, generally. So often they aren’t needed. I have a bit of a thing about them.

I’m reviewing a manuscript and hunting down the word “the.” I’m finding many places where it isn’t necessary. I haven’t seen any articles published on this, but have recently heard from other writers that they too are cutting back their use of “the.” Has anyone else out there heard talks or read blogs about this?

I’ve been removing “the” and sometimes I have to put them back to make the grammar checker happy. My least favorite is dueling grammar checkers with opposing suggestions. This seems to happen a lot with commas and “is this one word or two” (time line vs timeline, minigun vs mini-gun, etc.)

I’ve never heard of that.

“Said” is WAY too overused, and there are so many synonyms and more descriptive words rather than “said”.

I agree. It gets boring, yet we are constantly told ‘use said’ as it’s not noticed by readers.

Great article! I have a list of words I tend to overuse. I do a Find search through my manuscript to get rid of them.

Thanks for the article, it will help me greatly. I recognize several weaknesses in my writing from the words to “avoid”. My principals are the to be +ING and the word that, it is very difficult for me to change my sentences construction.

Having difficulty refraining from using the word ‘since.’ Since X happened, (then) Y occurred. Multi-syllabic synonyms don’t get the job done as well.

Hello, I’m looking for a “style” guide to tell me if a word is now considered or IS rude, offensive, pejorative, belittling of a person, and/or just plain ignorant.

In The Searcher, Tana French repeatedly has characters say things with a grin. It is driving me nuts.

These are dull and colorless compared to concrete nouns, powerful verbs, and vivid adjectives. Good writers try to avoid these empty, weak words and replace them with strong words.

Enjoyed. Thanks.

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Common words to avoid when writing formally

I am rather useless at writing formal English and sometimes find that I can come across informal with my choice of words. So I wondered what common words and phrases should be avoided when writing an essay.

non-fiction
word-choice

2 Somewhat difficult to answer. Perhaps you could post a snippet of something you wrote in what you thought was a formal manner and we can offer suggestions? – morganpdx Commented Mar 28, 2011 at 23:00
2 You could post this at the writers.stackexchange site too. This seems like something they might like. – kitukwfyer Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 1:50
2 This question should be moved to writers. – nohat Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 7:56

4 Answers 4

I'm not sure if there's a good, quick fix for this. I learned how to write English in an intelligent, formal manner from learning German, and reading lots, and lots, of English.

Anyhow, avoid "kind of" and "sort of." That used to drive my English teachers crazy.

Also avoid the verb "to be" when possible. Sometimes "to be" is the best option, but not as often as many people use it. If you can restate some "is adjective" as a verb, do it and see if it works. If it does, keep it. If it's too painful...still try to think "it hurts" before you give up. ;) The same can be said of "is verbing." Sometimes that's the best construction to use, and if you think it is, don't hesitate, but if you think using just a single verb works just as well, do that. If nothing else it will give your sentences a little more variety.

Furthermore: Not having lots of unnecessary "to be"s scattered around your paper will make it cleaner, and by extension, more "formal." As can be seen in the comments, there are a number of people who don't agree with me on this, or the converse that having too many "to be"s can make your writing seem immature. So, Note: I'm not saying "to be" is some hideous disease that needs to be rooted out of all writing. It's a good verb. I'm rather fond of it myself. I'll give you an example of what seems to me an unnecessary "to be":

"Bob is always careful when driving his kids to school." I think this would be better rewritten without the is: "Bob always takes care when driving his kids to school." or "Bob always drives carefully when taking his kids to school." It's a small thing, and the effect is negligible in one sentence, but imagine reading how Bob "is" 50 different adjectives. I, personally, would grow to dislike Bob rather quickly. Reading that Bob does 50 different things is not the same thing at all, in my opinion. I hope I've made myself clearer on that. :)

Avoid the first and second person like the plague... I would honestly advise against bringing the anonymous "one" and that poor, exhausted "reader" into it as well. Find some way to rephrase the sentence. There seems to be some odd stigma against passive voice, but I, personally, prefer it to using "one." IMHO, "it might be thought that..." sounds better than "one might think that..." but "it might seem that..." is even better. (Another case where replacing "to be..." with another verb is an improvement, both because it gets rid of the passive voice, which will make some people happy, and because it's just that slightest bit easier to read.) Better yet would be to leave all "might"s out of it. Imply every action you can to the author/whatever and be definite about it. "It seems (based on blah) that..." is better than "it might seem that..."...Being specific gets rid of a lot of ambiguity wherein lies much informality. (...Or should I have said "specificity?" Which one sounds more "formal?" ^.^)

Finally, as I noted in a comment, use the word that works best, regardless of origin, apparent intelligence, etc..

To get a better handle on what word works best, I suggest reading some classics. The best way, IMHO, to learn "classy" vocabulary, is to read classy, English fiction....Anything (and everything) will help, but it's pretty safe to consider Dickens and his ilk to be a crash-course in good "formal" writing.

3 Not really a -1, but... "to be" is not that bad per se. Your "death" example, for example, changes meaning. "He is near death" is a state, while "He nears death" (apart from sounding slightly wrong) puts emphasis on the process. I'd prefer the former in almost all contexts, your teachers can go and... do something unpleasant. Teachers are not w/o fail, and to just take everything a teacher (or some commenter here, me included) says at face value is not the best course of action. – Jürgen A. Erhard Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 10:25
But still a +1 for the intro: read. Lots. The best advice of all. – Jürgen A. Erhard Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 10:29
@jae: Yeah, sometimes "to be" is the best option...and it probably would be in the death example. That's just what I get for answering on the verge of unconsciousness! Still, I think that overusing "to be" is a good way to make your writing seem simple and immature. – kitukwfyer Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 13:13
2 +1 for a good answer. Just one nit: "it might seem that..." isn't passive voice. Passive voice involves the subject of the sentence being acted on rather than doing the acting. – Kelly C Hess Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 14:20
1 I have never heard of the stricture against "to be" in the construction given above. Why would it be considered immature or simple? – Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 14:23

Here are some guidelines that might help:

Avoid contractions. Prefer It is interesting to note... over It's interesting to note...
Avoid use of the 2nd person. Prefer One might think that... over You might think that...
It is probably not useful to list examples of slang here, but when in doubt, check the dictionary. If it defines the word/phrase as slang, then choose another.

Avoid clichés. Use the right word, and make sure each word is doing work. Keeping your prose clean is one of the best ways to achieve a formal style.

And focus on your audience: formal to an editor may not be formal to a committee or an employer, etc. If you're writing for a class or for work, see if there is a style guide or manual that you use.

When there's a choice of particular word, favor the Latinate one.

3 I hate that. Whenever I read someone using Latinate words just for the heck of it, I want to beat him to death with a hardback copy of Roget's Thesaurus . – Michael Lorton Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 0:32
1 I don't like overdosing on latin either, and I think this advice is a superficial sort of salve... but it can give a formal gloss to a paper. Always use caution, though. A lot of "synonyms" are only synonyms in the grossest sense. If you get a Germanic word that fits perfectly, use it. Don't use a less perfect smart-sounding word just because it sounds smart, especially if you're unfamiliar with it. As I said, the formality of latin is superficial, and if the latin screws up your meaning and makes you sound like an idiot...? No amount of supposed "formality" is going to rescue you. – kitukwfyer Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 1:56
@kitukwyfer: The question moved so I didn't see comments til now... My answer is only descriptive. Other things being equal (if that is ever possible), the latinate phrasing will -be- more formal (I can't think of any pairs of romance derived/Germanic derived pairs where the Germanic one is more formal than the Latinate one. As to -quality-, that is, as you note, quite another thing entirely. – Mitch Commented Apr 19, 2011 at 22:22

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Recent posts, subscribe here, more expert advice, 5 college essay examples & what to avoid.

College essays need to start strong. They’re competing for an admissions officer’s attention, and you don’t want to lose your reader before your story ever really gets going. Here are five opening college essay examples to avoid, in other words, what's more likely to lose a reader’s interest.

It's that time of year again. The point in the application timeline where students are, or should be, getting ready to write drafts of their essays. Crafting strong essays for the application can be difficult for students, even the most skilled writers. Especially with students expected to write multiple essays with very different styles, it can feel overwhelming to submit a confident essay.

Just remember that first impressions matter in life and in college essays.

Personal Statement vs. Supplemental Essays

When applying through the Common Application, students are typically expected to write one personal statement submitted to every college and at least one supplemental essay per college.

The supplemental essay(s) demonstrate cultural and institutional fit for admissions officers. Many students refer to these essays as the 'why us' essays. And simply put, admissions officers want to learn why students are interested in the college and what makes them a great addition to their campus.

The personal statement, however, is an opportunity to show college admissions committees who the student is beyond the four walls of their classroom. Typically 650 words in length, the personal statement is, well, unique to each student. There is no 'right way' to write the personal statement, but we have a few tips to help students maximize their writing and avoid crafting a weak opening for their college essay. Each tip will also include an example of a real opening written by a former Collegewise student to demonstrate the tips we share!

To learn more about how to crack the supplemental essay, watch our Cracking the Supplemental Essays video!

1. An Introduction to Your Story

Imagine a student is telling a friend a story about life as a pitcher on the baseball team. The student wouldn’t start with, “Often in life, we face difficult situations that ultimately benefit us. While we may not see it at the time….” The speaker would lose the person’s interest before ever getting to the good stuff.

College essays work the same way. They’re stories, and stories need a beginning, not an introduction; instead of writing a general introduction to warm the reader up to a particular topic, starting with a clear opening that ties to the story are the best way to pique an admissions officer's interest in what they might learn from reading the essay further.

Real college essay example: " The worst part about being the slowest runner on my school’s cross country team is that I occasionally fall so far behind that I have to stop and ask for directions."

2. A Famous Quote

An essay that begins, “John F. Kennedy once said…” is already on the wrong track. Unless the quote was actually directed at the writer, the reader cares a lot more about what the student has to say than they do about any famous person’s pithy words. The one exception? Quotes can be effective when they’re part of the story. Say a student is writing about their experiences on a sports team, including a quote from one of their coaches can make their story more impactful.

Real college essay example: " My baseball coach always says, “We’re going to play smart baseball, gentlemen because dumb baseball is no fun to play and even less fun to watch.”

3. A Definition

Opening with a definition like “Persistence is defined as…,” will probably not be a strong start. The reader, an admissions officer, doesn’t need the student to define words; they need them to tell a story that will help them learn all about who they are. If the personal statement is about persistence, explain how that trait is personified. Additionally, with the limited space students are given to share their stories, focusing on providing necessary details and leaving definitions to Google will help them maximize their writing.

Real college essay example: " I hate heights. I am a complete scaredy-cat when it comes to heights. It must be genetic because there’s not much else that scares me. I’m usually pretty calm and composed. I have to be. There’s no time to be scared when you’re in the back of a speeding ambulance doing chest compressions on a nineteen-year-old motorcycle accident victim who’s just gone into full cardiac arrest. I did that last week.”

4. Being Too Creative & Lacking Clarity

Some students try so hard to be creative, or to entice the reader with a sense of intrigue, that they sacrifice clarity. If the reader is one paragraph in and thinking, “I don’t have a clue what this student is talking about,” the arousing interest has moved to confusion. It’s certainly possible and often effective to begin an essay with a description that piques interest without necessarily revealing exactly what the description is about. What's important to remember is that although the personal statement is a unique essay, a student should stay true to the writing style they feel most comfortable with.

Real college essay example: " Once you know what the chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken looks like before it’s cooked, you will never want to eat it again. I love my part-time job, and I’ve worked there for almost three years. But I really don’t enjoy looking at that chicken before it’s cooked."

5. Anything that Would Show Up on Google

You might think you’ve read or heard the perfect opening someplace else—a book of sample essays, a speech, a line in your favorite movie, etc. But pirating someone else’s writing is plagiarism, and every college I can think of would frown on an applicant who steals other people’s work without crediting the source. There’s always that chance that your reader could recognize what you’re sharing. And if they have even the slightest suspicion, the answer will always be just a Google search away.

FAQs & Final Thoughts

While there is no 'right' way to start any college essay, a few approaches may not be the best use of the limited space students have. Our list is just a few of the many tips we share with our students to ensure they're submitting confident essays to the admissions committees. In addition to our essay don'ts, we've come across a few frequently asked questions regarding college essays or the personal statement.

What are the Common App Essay Topics?

Each year the Common App releases its 7 essay prompts from which students can choose and write. Although they usually stay the same, there may come a year where one of two may change. That's why it's important to review the prompts early.

To read through the Common App's 2021-22 essay prompts, read our Common App Essay Topics blog!

Are there Essay Topics To Avoid?

In short, yes! What's important to remember is that admissions officers read hundreds, if not thousands, of essays every application year, and they've read it all. Students need to write about their experiences and what helped shape them to be who they are rather than what they feel admissions officers want to read.

How Personal Should The Personal Statement Be?

Although the personal statement is a unique story for every student, many students write about personal struggles, challenges they face, and situations they overcame. And while there is no set list of topics to avoid, it is important to note that students should share how much they are comfortable with. After all, a stranger will be reading this essay.

Additional readings:

Is a Personal Struggle an Appropriate Essay Topic?
Is Your College Essay Ready to Submit?
Tackling the Common App Personal Essay

About Us: With more than twenty years of experience, Collegewise counselors and tutors are at the forefront of the ever-evolving admissions landscape. Our work has always centered on you: the family. And just like we’ve always done, we look for ways for your student to be their best self - whether in the classroom, the applications, or in the right-fit college environment. Our range of counseling , test prep , academic tutoring , and essay management, all with the support of our proprietary platform , lead to 4x higher than average admissions rates.

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Bad College Essay Examples: 5 Essay Mistakes To Avoid

Grades, GPA, and transcripts are important components when applying to college. But numbers only tell part of the story. The college admissions essay plays a much more powerful role in telling your personal story to college admissions officers. So while university admissions departments may set initial cut-offs based on numbers, they make their final decision based on your college personal statement essay.

At Wordvice, we know college admissions essays. Every year, we receive tens of millions of words to edit from students applying to college. Therefore, we know what good college essays, bad college essays, and great college essays look like–and what students should do in their essays to get the attention of admissions officers.

Here we will cover how to write a good college personal statement by looking at some common college admission essay mistakes to avoid and discuss ways to improve your college application essays.

What does a good college application essay look like?

Before looking at some essay mistakes to avoid (or “bad college essays” to be a bit more blunt), let’s discuss what a good admissions essay does. Effective college personal statements give broad, comprehensive insights into your personal and academic background, provide college admissions counselors with an overview of your goals, and answer the college prompt directly and clearly.

One of the best ways to learn how to write a good college application essay is to look at what successful students wrote.

Check out a few powerful examples of successful personal statements so you can recognize what a great college application essay looks like. Reading examples of college essays can help you to understand exactly what college admissions officers are looking for.

Useful Tips on How to Write a College Admissions Essay

Once you take a look at what some successful college essay examples look like, the second step should be looking at some useful tips and checklists. This will help organize your college essay writing process, so look at these tips before you start writing and check them off as you go.

Quick Tips to Conquer the College Application Essay
Six Tips for Proofreading your College Admissions Essay

Why it’s Important to Avoid Mistakes in Your College Essay

Even if you include all of the above positive tips in your college application essay, you still need to be aware of and avoid common college application essay mistakes. The importance of this cannot be understated.

Negativity bias is the concept in psychology that people will remember, dwell on, and act upon unpleasant thoughts and emotions as compared to positive or correct ones. Therefore, applicants should focus on the positive and productive elements of their personal narrative in the essay, even if this story includes some negative events or circumstances.

What does this mean for your college application essay?

Your personal statement is not only scanned by AI-powered grammar and spell checker apps to weed out simple mistakes outright, they are also read, interpreted, and graded by real human college admissions officers. These are seasoned professionals who will reject your college essay for any reason they deem fit.

Randi Heathman, an independent education consultant, gives a clear summary of why application essays are rejected :

Weak essays get skimmed. If a student’s essay isn’t great OR good, the admission officer will probably just skim past the essay and move right on to your transcript and your test scores to evaluate your candidacy for admission. Bad essays don’t get read. Period. A bad essay will prompt an admission officer to assume one of two things: 1) either you don’t care enough about your future at their school to take the time to write a good essay or 2) you aren’t academically up to attending their college or university. Neither of those assumptions will help you get admitted.

Do you see a theme here? Your college admissions essay needs to not only engage in and answer the prompt but also not give admissions officers any reasons to discard it.

For this reason, students must actively avoid the following college admissions essay mistakes.

Common College Essay Mistakes To Avoid

Below is a list and analysis of the types of mistakes to avoid on your college personal statement and avoid writing a bad college essay that will likely NOT get you into your program of choice.

bad college essay examples, broken plate metaphor

Your Application Essay Repeats the Essay Prompt

Many universities have strict word counts that are designed to make the admissions process more efficient but also force you to write concisely.

For example, Villanova University has two application essays . The free choice essay is limited to 250 words while its “Why Nova?” essay is limited to just 100 words!

So if you really want to ruin your chances of admission, repeat the essay prompt. Veteran college admissions officers will instantly trash your essay. It shows laziness and is interpreted as you not respecting their time. You need every opportunity to show who you are, your goals, and how you align with your target university. The best students have plenty to write about, and so should you.

Your Application Essay Uses Cliches

One of the biggest mistakes to avoid in your college admissions essay would be including tired clichés that don’t add interesting points or content. Don’t try to sound profound, exclusive, or postmodern in your writing. This will be obvious to the reader, and you probably will also not be the best writer or candidate on paper they have seen. What’s actually important is to demonstrate your self-awareness, your self-confidence, and your priorities and goals.

Trying desperately to sound special will make you end up sounding like every other applicant, and admissions officers are experts at spotting fakes. You have plenty of resources to work with. Make sure your ideas are your own.

Example of clichés in an essay

When explaining a personal setback or a difficult decision, instead of writing, “This event was a disparate result antithetical to my character,” show some personal ownership and be straightforward. Here is a better way to phrase this sentiment: “This is a decision I am not proud of, but it helped me learn a valuable lesson and put me in a better place today. Without this formative experience, I wouldn’t be the kind of person who applies myself in every challenging circumstance.”

Need extra help improving your essay writing? Check out these 14 tricks to make your writing clearer and more engaging :

Your Admissions Essay Shares Too Much Personal Information

You have probably read everywhere that your personal statement should be, well, personal. Colleges want to get to know not just your academic background but also your personal worldview and interactions with successful people.

This doesn’t mean you should discuss deeply personal issues at length or in too great of detail. Even controversial topics such as religion and politics are often welcomed if your perspective is well reasoned and fair. However, you must be able to demonstrate you can respect, recognize, and maintain personal boundaries. That is a key life skill that college admissions committees are looking for.

Examples of sharing too much personal information

Don’t discuss your sexual experiences. Your sexual orientation may be a key part of your overall identity. However, limit this by keeping out details of personal activities. Use common sense and understand that most admissions officers are members of the general public who might not respond favorably to explicit details of your personal life.
Don’t confess to strange, illegal, or immoral behaviors or beliefs. If you have a strange obsession, keep it to yourself. Only include unique aspects about your character or preferences if are key parts of how you view the world or your success as a student.
Don’t insult subgroups of people . You never know who your college admissions officer will be. You want to show you know how to interface with the world, and your college application is a big first step to showing your maturity and inclusive views.

Your Admissions Essay is a Sympathy Essay

This essay mistake is very similar to oversharing personal information. These types of essays are usually a long list of all the terrible things that have happened to you with the hope that the admissions committee will take pity because they feel bad for you.

Newsflash: the “sympathy approach” likely is not going to work. A lot of prospective students have gone through the divorce of their parents, the death of a friend or family member, medical issues, disabilities, mental health issues, accidents, etc.

If you do want to include these life-changing or identity-forming events, they must be used to explain how they shaped you as a person, what you learned, and how you handled adversity. Show how you grew as a person or how your worldview and character were altered to make you into the excellent college candidate you are today.

Examples of “sympathy essays”

“Everyone around me kept me from succeeding.” Like the lyrics of an early-2000’s rock song, some application essays foreground their experiences on a canvas of pain and oppression by all the people around them. This is just self-defeating. Even if something happened that changed your plans, upset you, or harmed you in some way, reframe your story to show how you were able to shift your priorities and succeed after you learned what you were unable to do.
“Becoming injured my senior year ruined my plans.” If you are an athlete and suffered a career or scholarship-ending injury, that is a big deal. But your potential doesn’t just disappear because of a setback. Whatever events and influences made you who you were before are still more important than a single unfortunate occurrence in your past.

stanley from the office, bad college essay examples

Your Application Essay Gives You All the Credit

While you may have top SAT scores, a high GPA, and lots of awards, don’t forget this one simple truth: there are always bigger fish in the sea. No matter how good of an applicant you are, there will be someone better based on whatever metric you are proud of.

So what should you write about in your college application essay to stand out from the many overachievers?

Try humility and perspective. Don’t forget to give credit where credit is due. No person is an island, so in your essay you can give recognition to those who helped you along the way. Try not to belittle or minimize the contribution of your high school teachers or mentors. Admissions counselors, as educational professionals, will be looking to see if you are ready to interact with the next level of academic educators. So including friends, family members, and mentors who helped you grow and develop could be a good topic for your college personal statement.

Examples of “giving yourself all the credit” in an essay

“I was valedictorian and did it all by myself.” You should be proud of your academic achievements, as they are important for your college application among other goals. However, give credit to someone who helped you learn. You didn’t teach yourself!
“In the end, I found the only person I could rely on was myself.” Some students come from very tough backgrounds, and so it can be tempting for these students to stress this in their essay. But remember that college admissions offices want you to add value to the university community as a college student at their school. Even the smartest students cannot do this if they fail to acknowledge the contributions of others.

Your Personal Statement Has Not Received Proofreading or Editing

A sure way to get your college essay thrown aside is to have it full of grammar and spelling mistakes. The college admissions process is very competitive, and you need every edge you can get. You should spend a substantial portion of your essay preparation editing and proofreading after writing your personal statement.

Start by reviewing and revising the essay yourself. Read it aloud. Run it through a couple of online spelling and grammar checkers. And start early on each college application–at least two weeks before the application deadline. You should also consider giving your admissions essay to a friend, parent, or teacher to review. This can help you improve your essay in many ways because other people can give quite different perspectives.

Check out the Benefits of Peer Review vs Self-Editing .

Finally, you should look into using an application essay proofreading and editing service to revise and improve your application essay. Just as peer review is superior to self-editing alone, professional proofreading services and application essay editing services are superior to peer review. The hard truth is that too many other students (your competition) are going above and beyond in preparing these important essays. Being short on time and expertise makes using an editing and proofreading service a good solution.

How Does Wordvice Improve Your College Application Essay?

Wordvice editors are required to have graduate or postgraduate degrees. This means you are getting guaranteed expertise compared to other services, which typically only require editors to hold a bachelor’s degree. Wordvice is also among the top-rated essay editing services and personal statement editing services by Wired.com. We achieved this recognition by following the Wordvice Customer Promise . That means providing value to every student and every personal statement we edit.

Additional Admissions Essay Steps to Take

We hope you learned a lot from these examples of successful college personal statements. So what’s next?

I want to learn more about the college admissions process

Interested in learning more tips from experts about the college admissions process, personal statements, or letters of recommendation? Check out the Wordvice Admissions Resource blog .

I am interested in professional editing for my personal statement

We also got you covered! Check out our English editing services to get started on improving your college essays. Or jump straight in and use our editing price calculator to get an editing price quote and start the ordering process.

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40 Useful Words and Phrases for Top-Notch Essays

To be truly brilliant, an essay needs to utilise the right language. You could make a great point, but if it’s not intelligently articulated, you almost needn’t have bothered.

Developing the language skills to build an argument and to write persuasively is crucial if you’re to write outstanding essays every time. In this article, we’re going to equip you with the words and phrases you need to write a top-notch essay, along with examples of how to utilise them.

It’s by no means an exhaustive list, and there will often be other ways of using the words and phrases we describe that we won’t have room to include, but there should be more than enough below to help you make an instant improvement to your essay-writing skills.

If you’re interested in developing your language and persuasive skills, Oxford Royale offers summer courses at its Oxford Summer School , Cambridge Summer School , London Summer School , San Francisco Summer School and Yale Summer School . You can study courses to learn english , prepare for careers in law , medicine , business , engineering and leadership.

General explaining

Let’s start by looking at language for general explanations of complex points.

1. In order to

Usage: “In order to” can be used to introduce an explanation for the purpose of an argument. Example: “In order to understand X, we need first to understand Y.”

2. In other words

Usage: Use “in other words” when you want to express something in a different way (more simply), to make it easier to understand, or to emphasise or expand on a point. Example: “Frogs are amphibians. In other words, they live on the land and in the water.”

3. To put it another way

Usage: This phrase is another way of saying “in other words”, and can be used in particularly complex points, when you feel that an alternative way of wording a problem may help the reader achieve a better understanding of its significance. Example: “Plants rely on photosynthesis. To put it another way, they will die without the sun.”

4. That is to say

Usage: “That is” and “that is to say” can be used to add further detail to your explanation, or to be more precise. Example: “Whales are mammals. That is to say, they must breathe air.”

5. To that end

Usage: Use “to that end” or “to this end” in a similar way to “in order to” or “so”. Example: “Zoologists have long sought to understand how animals communicate with each other. To that end, a new study has been launched that looks at elephant sounds and their possible meanings.”

Adding additional information to support a point

Students often make the mistake of using synonyms of “and” each time they want to add further information in support of a point they’re making, or to build an argument. Here are some cleverer ways of doing this.

6. Moreover

Usage: Employ “moreover” at the start of a sentence to add extra information in support of a point you’re making. Example: “Moreover, the results of a recent piece of research provide compelling evidence in support of…”

7. Furthermore

Usage:This is also generally used at the start of a sentence, to add extra information. Example: “Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that…”

8. What’s more

Usage: This is used in the same way as “moreover” and “furthermore”. Example: “What’s more, this isn’t the only evidence that supports this hypothesis.”

9. Likewise

Usage: Use “likewise” when you want to talk about something that agrees with what you’ve just mentioned. Example: “Scholar A believes X. Likewise, Scholar B argues compellingly in favour of this point of view.”

10. Similarly

Usage: Use “similarly” in the same way as “likewise”. Example: “Audiences at the time reacted with shock to Beethoven’s new work, because it was very different to what they were used to. Similarly, we have a tendency to react with surprise to the unfamiliar.”

11. Another key thing to remember

Usage: Use the phrase “another key point to remember” or “another key fact to remember” to introduce additional facts without using the word “also”. Example: “As a Romantic, Blake was a proponent of a closer relationship between humans and nature. Another key point to remember is that Blake was writing during the Industrial Revolution, which had a major impact on the world around him.”

12. As well as

Usage: Use “as well as” instead of “also” or “and”. Example: “Scholar A argued that this was due to X, as well as Y.”

13. Not only… but also

Usage: This wording is used to add an extra piece of information, often something that’s in some way more surprising or unexpected than the first piece of information. Example: “Not only did Edmund Hillary have the honour of being the first to reach the summit of Everest, but he was also appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.”

14. Coupled with

Usage: Used when considering two or more arguments at a time. Example: “Coupled with the literary evidence, the statistics paint a compelling view of…”

15. Firstly, secondly, thirdly…

Usage: This can be used to structure an argument, presenting facts clearly one after the other. Example: “There are many points in support of this view. Firstly, X. Secondly, Y. And thirdly, Z.

16. Not to mention/to say nothing of

Usage: “Not to mention” and “to say nothing of” can be used to add extra information with a bit of emphasis. Example: “The war caused unprecedented suffering to millions of people, not to mention its impact on the country’s economy.”

Words and phrases for demonstrating contrast

When you’re developing an argument, you will often need to present contrasting or opposing opinions or evidence – “it could show this, but it could also show this”, or “X says this, but Y disagrees”. This section covers words you can use instead of the “but” in these examples, to make your writing sound more intelligent and interesting.

17. However

Usage: Use “however” to introduce a point that disagrees with what you’ve just said. Example: “Scholar A thinks this. However, Scholar B reached a different conclusion.”

18. On the other hand

Usage: Usage of this phrase includes introducing a contrasting interpretation of the same piece of evidence, a different piece of evidence that suggests something else, or an opposing opinion. Example: “The historical evidence appears to suggest a clear-cut situation. On the other hand, the archaeological evidence presents a somewhat less straightforward picture of what happened that day.”

19. Having said that

Usage: Used in a similar manner to “on the other hand” or “but”. Example: “The historians are unanimous in telling us X, an agreement that suggests that this version of events must be an accurate account. Having said that, the archaeology tells a different story.”

20. By contrast/in comparison

Usage: Use “by contrast” or “in comparison” when you’re comparing and contrasting pieces of evidence. Example: “Scholar A’s opinion, then, is based on insufficient evidence. By contrast, Scholar B’s opinion seems more plausible.”

21. Then again

Usage: Use this to cast doubt on an assertion. Example: “Writer A asserts that this was the reason for what happened. Then again, it’s possible that he was being paid to say this.”

22. That said

Usage: This is used in the same way as “then again”. Example: “The evidence ostensibly appears to point to this conclusion. That said, much of the evidence is unreliable at best.”

Usage: Use this when you want to introduce a contrasting idea. Example: “Much of scholarship has focused on this evidence. Yet not everyone agrees that this is the most important aspect of the situation.”

Adding a proviso or acknowledging reservations

Sometimes, you may need to acknowledge a shortfalling in a piece of evidence, or add a proviso. Here are some ways of doing so.

24. Despite this

Usage: Use “despite this” or “in spite of this” when you want to outline a point that stands regardless of a shortfalling in the evidence. Example: “The sample size was small, but the results were important despite this.”

25. With this in mind

Usage: Use this when you want your reader to consider a point in the knowledge of something else. Example: “We’ve seen that the methods used in the 19th century study did not always live up to the rigorous standards expected in scientific research today, which makes it difficult to draw definite conclusions. With this in mind, let’s look at a more recent study to see how the results compare.”

26. Provided that

Usage: This means “on condition that”. You can also say “providing that” or just “providing” to mean the same thing. Example: “We may use this as evidence to support our argument, provided that we bear in mind the limitations of the methods used to obtain it.”

27. In view of/in light of

Usage: These phrases are used when something has shed light on something else. Example: “In light of the evidence from the 2013 study, we have a better understanding of…”

28. Nonetheless

Usage: This is similar to “despite this”. Example: “The study had its limitations, but it was nonetheless groundbreaking for its day.”

29. Nevertheless

Usage: This is the same as “nonetheless”. Example: “The study was flawed, but it was important nevertheless.”

30. Notwithstanding

Usage: This is another way of saying “nonetheless”. Example: “Notwithstanding the limitations of the methodology used, it was an important study in the development of how we view the workings of the human mind.”

Giving examples

Good essays always back up points with examples, but it’s going to get boring if you use the expression “for example” every time. Here are a couple of other ways of saying the same thing.

31. For instance

Example: “Some birds migrate to avoid harsher winter climates. Swallows, for instance, leave the UK in early winter and fly south…”

32. To give an illustration

Example: “To give an illustration of what I mean, let’s look at the case of…”

Signifying importance

When you want to demonstrate that a point is particularly important, there are several ways of highlighting it as such.

33. Significantly

Usage: Used to introduce a point that is loaded with meaning that might not be immediately apparent. Example: “Significantly, Tacitus omits to tell us the kind of gossip prevalent in Suetonius’ accounts of the same period.”

34. Notably

Usage: This can be used to mean “significantly” (as above), and it can also be used interchangeably with “in particular” (the example below demonstrates the first of these ways of using it). Example: “Actual figures are notably absent from Scholar A’s analysis.”

35. Importantly

Usage: Use “importantly” interchangeably with “significantly”. Example: “Importantly, Scholar A was being employed by X when he wrote this work, and was presumably therefore under pressure to portray the situation more favourably than he perhaps might otherwise have done.”

Summarising

You’ve almost made it to the end of the essay, but your work isn’t over yet. You need to end by wrapping up everything you’ve talked about, showing that you’ve considered the arguments on both sides and reached the most likely conclusion. Here are some words and phrases to help you.

36. In conclusion

Usage: Typically used to introduce the concluding paragraph or sentence of an essay, summarising what you’ve discussed in a broad overview. Example: “In conclusion, the evidence points almost exclusively to Argument A.”

37. Above all

Usage: Used to signify what you believe to be the most significant point, and the main takeaway from the essay. Example: “Above all, it seems pertinent to remember that…”

38. Persuasive

Usage: This is a useful word to use when summarising which argument you find most convincing. Example: “Scholar A’s point – that Constanze Mozart was motivated by financial gain – seems to me to be the most persuasive argument for her actions following Mozart’s death.”

39. Compelling

Usage: Use in the same way as “persuasive” above. Example: “The most compelling argument is presented by Scholar A.”

40. All things considered

Usage: This means “taking everything into account”. Example: “All things considered, it seems reasonable to assume that…”

How many of these words and phrases will you get into your next essay? And are any of your favourite essay terms missing from our list? Let us know in the comments below, or get in touch here to find out more about courses that can help you with your essays.

At Oxford Royale Academy, we offer a number of summer school courses for young people who are keen to improve their essay writing skills. Click here to apply for one of our courses today, including law , business , medicine and engineering .

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He is dangerous in word, deed and action

He puts self over country, he loathes the laws we live by, donald trump is unfit to lead.

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom.

Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president of the United States. A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great.

It is a chilling choice against this national moment. For more than two decades, large majorities of Americans have said they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and the post-Covid era of stubborn inflation, high interest rates, social division and political stagnation has left many voters even more frustrated and despondent.

The Republican Party once pursued electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building “the shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan liked to say. Its vision of the United States — embodied in principled public servants like George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — was rooted in the values of freedom, sacrifice, individual responsibility and the common good. The party’s conception of those values was reflected in its longstanding conservative policy agenda, and today many Republicans set aside their concerns about Mr. Trump because of his positions on immigration, trade and taxes. But the stakes of this election are not fundamentally about policy disagreements. The stakes are more foundational: what qualities matter most in America’s president and commander in chief.

Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.

He is, quite simply, unfit to lead.

The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate about whether President Biden is the right person to carry the party’s nomination into the election, given widespread concerns among voters about his age-related fitness. This debate is so intense because of legitimate concerns that Mr. Trump may present a danger to the country, its strength, security and national character — and that a compelling Democratic alternative is the only thing that would prevent his return to power. It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to have a similar debate about the manifest moral and temperamental unfitness of their standard-bearer, instead setting aside their longstanding values, closing ranks and choosing to overlook what those who worked most closely with the former president have described as his systematic dishonesty, corruption, cruelty and incompetence.

That task now falls to the American people. We urge voters to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it. The stakes and significance of the presidency demand a person who has essential qualities and values to earn our trust, and on each one, Donald Trump fails.

Moral Fitness Matters

Presidents are confronted daily with challenges that require not just strength and conviction but also honesty, humility, selflessness, fortitude and the perspective that comes from sound moral judgment.

If Mr. Trump has these qualities, Americans have never seen them in action on behalf of the nation’s interests. His words and actions demonstrate a disregard for basic right and wrong and a clear lack of moral fitness for the responsibilities of the presidency.

He lies blatantly and maliciously, embraces racists , abuses women and has a schoolyard bully’s instinct to target society’s most vulnerable. He has delighted in coarsening and polarizing the town square with ever more divisive and incendiary language. Mr. Trump is a man who craves validation and vindication, so much that he would prefer a hostile leader’s lies to his own intelligence agencies’ truths and would shake down a vulnerable ally for short-term political advantage . His handling of everything from routine affairs to major crises was undermined by his blundering combination of impulsiveness, insecurity and unstudied certainty.

This record shows what can happen to a country led by such a person: America’s image, credibility and cohesion were relentlessly undermined by Mr. Trump during his term.

None of his wrongful actions are so obviously discrediting as his determined and systematic attempts to undermine the integrity of elections — the most basic element of any democracy — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump incited a mob to violence with hateful lies, then stood by for hours as hundreds of his supporters took his word and stormed the Capitol with the aim of terrorizing members of Congress into keeping him in office. He praised these insurrectionists and called them patriots; today he gives them a starring role at campaign rallies, playing a rendition of the national anthem sung by inmates involved with Jan. 6., and he has promised to consider pardoning the rioters if re-elected. He continues to wrong the country and its voters by lying about the 2020 election, branding it stolen, despite the courts, the Justice Department and Republican state officials disputing him. No man fit for the presidency would flog such pernicious and destructive lies about democratic norms and values, but the Trumpian hunger for vindication and retribution has no moral center.

To vest such a person with the vast powers of the presidency is to endanger American interests and security at home as well as abroad. The nation’s commander in chief must uphold the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” It is the closest thing that this secular nation has to a sacred trust. The president has several duties and powers that are his alone: He has the sole authority to launch a nuclear weapon. He has the authority to send American troops into harm’s way and to authorize the use of lethal force against individuals and other nations. Americans who serve in the military also take an oath to defend the Constitution, and they rely on their commander in chief to take that oath as seriously as they do.

Mr. Trump has shown, repeatedly, that he does not. On numerous occasions, he asked his defense secretary and commanders in the American armed forces to violate that oath. On other occasions, he demanded that members of the military violate norms that preserve the dignity of the armed services and protect the military from being used for political purposes. They largely refused these illegal and immoral orders, as the oath requires.

The lack of moral grounding undermines Mr. Trump even in areas where voters view him as stronger and trust him more than Mr. Biden, like immigration and crime. Veering into a kind of brutal excess that is, at best, immoral and, at worst, unconstitutional, he has said that undocumented immigrants were “ poisoning the blood of our country ,” and his advisers say he would aim to round them up in mass detention camps and end birthright citizenship . He has indicated that, if faced with episodes of rioting or crime surges, he would unilaterally send troops into American cities. He has asked aides if the United States could shoot migrants below the waist to slow them down, and he has said that he would use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protesters.

During his time in office, none of those things happened because there were enough people in military leadership with the moral fitness to say “no” to such illegal orders. But there are good reasons to worry about whether that would happen again, as Mr. Trump works harder to surround himself with people who enable rather than check his most insidious impulses.

The Supreme Court, with its ruling on July 1 granting presidents “absolute immunity” for official acts, has removed an obstacle to Mr. Trump’s worst impulses: the threat of legal consequences. What remains is his own sense of right and wrong. Our country’s future is too precious to rely on such a broken moral compass.

Principled Leadership Matters

Republican presidents and presidential candidates have used their leadership at critical moments to set a tone for society to live up to. Mr. Reagan faced down totalitarianism in the 1980s, appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court and worked with Democrats on bipartisan tax and immigration reforms. George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act and decisively defended an ally, Kuwait, against Iraqi aggression. George W. Bush, for all his failures after Sept. 11, did not stoke hate against or demonize Muslims or Islam.

As a candidate during the 2008 race, Mr. McCain spoke out when his fellow conservatives spread lies about his opponent, Barack Obama. Mr. Romney was willing to sacrifice his standing and influence in the party he once represented as a presidential nominee, by boldly calling out Mr. Trump’s failings and voting for his removal from office.

These acts of leadership are what it means to put country first, to think beyond oneself.

Mr. Trump has demonstrated contempt for these American ideals. He admires autocrats, from Viktor Orban to Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un. He believes in the strongman model of power — a leader who makes things happen by demanding it, compelling agreement through force of will or personality. In reality, a strongman rules through fear and the unprincipled use of political might for self-serving ends, imposing poorly conceived policies that smother innovation, entrepreneurship, ideas and hope.

During his four years in office, Mr. Trump tried to govern the United States as a strongman would, issuing orders or making decrees on Twitter. He announced sudden changes in policy — on who can serve in the military , on trade policy, on how the United States deals with North Korea or Russia — without consulting experts on his staff about how these changes would affect America. Indeed, nowhere did he put his political or personal interests above the national interest more tragically than during the pandemic , when he faked his way through a crisis by touting conspiracy theories and pseudoscience while ignoring the advice of his own experts and resisting basic safety measures that would have saved lives.

He took a similar approach to America’s strategic relationships abroad. Mr. Trump lost the trust of America’s longstanding allies, especially in NATO, leaving Europe less secure and emboldening the far right and authoritarian leaders in Europe, Latin America and Asia. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, leaving that country, already a threat to the world, more dangerous, thanks to a revived program that has achieved near-weapons-grade uranium.

In a second term, his willingness to appease Mr. Putin would leave Ukraine’s future as a democratic and independent country in doubt. Mr. Trump implies that he could single-handedly end the catastrophic war in Gaza but has no real plan. He has suggested that in a second term he’d increase tariffs on Chinese goods to 60 percent or higher and that he would put a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods, moves that would raise prices for American consumers and reduce innovation by allowing U.S. industries to rely on protectionism instead.

The worst of the Trump administration’s policies were often blocked by Congress, by court challenges and by the objections of honorable public servants who stepped in to thwart his demands when they were irresponsible or did not follow the law. When Mr. Trump wanted an end to Obamacare, a single Republican senator, Mr. McCain, saved it, preserving health care for millions of Americans. Mr. Trump demanded that James Comey, his F.B.I. director, pledge loyalty to him and end an investigation into a political ally; Mr. Comey refused. Scientists and public health officials called out and corrected his misinformation about climate science and Covid. The Supreme Court sided against the Trump administration more times than any other president since at least Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A second Trump administration would be different. He intends to fill his administration with sycophants, those who have shown themselves willing to obey Mr. Trump’s demands or those who lack the strength to stand up to him. He wants to remove those who would be obstacles to his agenda, by enacting an order to make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with those more loyal to him.

This means not only that Americans would lose the benefit of their expertise but also that America would be governed in a climate of fear, in which government employees must serve the interests of the president rather than the public. All cabinet secretaries follow a president’s lead, but Mr. Trump envisions a nation in which public service as Americans understand it would cease to exist — where individual civil servants and departments could no longer make independent decisions and where research by scientists and public health experts and investigations by the Justice Department and others in federal law enforcement would be more malleable to the demands of the White House.

Another term under Mr. Trump’s leadership would risk doing permanent damage to our government. As Mr. Comey, a longtime Republican, wrote in a 2019 guest essay for Times Opinion, “Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from.” Very few who serve under him can avoid this fate “because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites,” Mr. Comey wrote. “Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.” America will get nowhere with a strongman. It needs a strong leader.

Character Matters

Character is the quality that gives a leader credibility, authority and influence. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump’s petty attacks on his opponents and their families led many Republicans to conclude that he lacked such character. Other Republicans, including those who supported the former president’s policies in office, say they can no longer in good conscience back him for the presidency. “It’s a job that requires the kind of character he just doesn’t have,” Paul Ryan, a former Republican House speaker, said of Mr. Trump in May .

Those who know Mr. Trump’s character best — the people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House — have expressed grave doubts about his fitness for office.

His former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, described Mr. Trump as “a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.” Bill Barr, whom Mr. Trump appointed as attorney general, said of him , “He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest.” James Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general who served as defense secretary, said , “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try.”

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has disavowed him. No other vice president in modern American history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said . “And anyone who asked someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

These are hardly exceptions. In any other American administration, a single cabinet-level defection is rare. But an unprecedented number of Mr. Trump’s appointees have publicly criticized his leadership, opposed his 2024 presidential candidacy or ducked questions about his fitness for a second term. More than a dozen of his most senior appointees — those he chose to work alongside him and who saw his performance most closely — have spoken out against him, serving as witnesses about the kind of leader he is.

There are many ways to judge leaders’ character; one is to see whether they accept responsibility for their actions. As a general rule, Mr. Trump abhors accountability. If he loses, the election is rigged. If he is convicted, it’s because the judges are out to get him. If he doesn’t get his way in a deal, as happened multiple times with Congress in his term, he shuts down the government or threatens to.

Americans do not expect their presidents to be perfect; many of them have exhibited hubris, self-regard, arrogance and other character flaws. But the American system of government is more than just the president: It is a system of checks and balances, and it relies on everyone in government to intervene when a president’s personal failings might threaten the common good.

Mr. Trump tested those limits as president, and little has changed about him in the four years since he lost re-election. He tries to intimidate anyone with the temerity to testify as a witness against him. He attacks the integrity of judges who are doing their duty to hold him accountable to the law. He mocks those he dislikes and lies about those who oppose him and targets Republicans for defeat if they fail to bend the knee.

It may be tempting for Americans to believe that a second Trump presidency would be much like the first, with the rest of government steeled to protect the country and resist his worst impulses. But the strongman needs others to be weak, and Mr. Trump is surrounding himself with yes men.

The American public has a right to demand more from their president and those who would serve under him.

A President’s Words Matter

When America saw white nationalists and neo-Nazis march through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and activists were rallying against racism, Mr. Trump spoke of “very fine people on both sides.” When he was pressed about the white supremacist Proud Boys during a 2020 debate, Mr. Trump told them to “stand back and stand by,” a request that, records show, they took literally in deciding to storm Congress. This winter, the former president urged Iowans to vote for him and score a victory over their fellow Americans — “all of the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps.” And in a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire, he used the word “vermin,” a term he has deployed to describe both immigrants and political opponents.

What a president says reflects on the United States and the kind of society we aspire to be.

In 2022 this board raised an urgent alarm about the rising threat of political violence in the United States and what Americans could do to stop it. At the time, Mr. Trump was preparing to declare his intention to run for president again, and the Republican Party was in the middle of a fight for control, between Trumpists and those who were ready to move on from his destructive leadership. This struggle within the party has consequences for all Americans. “A healthy democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or violent speech,” we wrote.

A large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that faction, Mr. Trump’s MAGA extremists, now control the party and its levers of power. There are many reasons his conquest of the Republican Party is bad for American democracy, but one of the most significant is that those extremists have often embraced violent speech or the belief in using violence to achieve their political goals. This belief led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and it has resulted in a rising number of threats against judges, elected officials and prosecutors.

This threat cannot be separated from Mr. Trump’s use of language to encourage violence, to dehumanize groups of people and to spread lies. A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, released in October 2022, came to the conclusion that MAGA Republicans (as opposed to those who identified themselves as traditional Republicans) “are more likely to hold extreme and racist beliefs, to endorse political violence, to see such violence as likely to occur and to predict that they will be armed under circumstances in which they consider political violence to be justified.”

The Republican Party had an opportunity to renounce Trumpism; it has submitted to it. Republican leaders have had many opportunities to repudiate his violent discourse and make clear that it should have no place in political life; they failed to. Sizable numbers of voters in Republican primaries abandoned Mr. Trump for other candidates, and independent and undecided voters have said that Mr. Trump’s language has alienated them from his candidacy.

But with his nomination by his party all but assured, Mr. Trump has become even more reckless in employing extreme and violent speech, such as his references to executing generals who raise questions about his actions. He has argued, before the Supreme Court, that he should have the right to assassinate a political rival and face no consequences.

The Rule of Law Matters

The danger from these foundational failings — of morals and character, of principled leadership and rhetorical excess — is never clearer than in Mr. Trump’s disregard for rule of law, his willingness to do long-term damage to the integrity of America’s systems for short-term personal gain.

As we’ve noted, Mr. Trump’s disregard for democracy was most evident in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to encourage violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power. What stood in his way were the many patriotic Americans, at every level of government, who rejected his efforts to bully them into complying with his demands to change election results. Instead, they followed the rules and followed the law. This respect for the rule of law, not the rule of men, is what has allowed American democracy to survive for more than 200 years.

In the four years since losing the election, Mr. Trump has become only more determined to subvert the rule of law, because his whole theory of Trumpism boils down to doing whatever he wants without consequence. Americans are seeing this unfold as Mr. Trump attempts to fight off numerous criminal charges. Not content to work within the law to defend himself, he is instead turning to sympathetic judges — including two Supreme Court justices with apparent conflicts over the 2020 election and Jan. 6-related litigation. The playbook: delay federal prosecution until he can win election and end those legal cases. His vision of government is one that does what he wants, rather than a government that operates according to the rule of law as prescribed by the Constitution, the courts and Congress.

As divided as America is, people across the political spectrum generally recoil from rigged rules, favoritism, self-dealing and abuse of power. Our country has been so stable for so long in part because most Americans and most American leaders follow the rules or face the consequences.

So much in the past two decades has tested these norms in our society — the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the failures that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, the pandemic and all the fractures and inequities that it revealed. We need a recommitment to the rule of law and the values of fair play. This election is a moment for Americans to decide whether we will keep striving for those ideals.

Mr. Trump rejects them. If he is re-elected, America will face a new and precarious future, one that it may not be prepared for. It is a future in which intelligence agencies would be judged not according to whether they preserved national security but by whether they served Mr. Trump’s political agenda. It means that prosecutors and law enforcement officials would be judged not according to whether they follow the law to keep Americans safe but by whether they obey his demands to “go after” political enemies. It means that public servants would be judged not according to their dedication or skill but by whether they show sufficient loyalty to him and his MAGA agenda.

Even if Mr. Trump’s vague policy agenda would not be fulfilled, he could rule by fear. The lesson of other countries shows that when a bureaucracy is politicized or pressured, the best public servants will run for the exits.

This is what has already happened in Mr. Trump’s Republican Party, with principled leaders and officials retiring, quitting or facing ouster. In a second term, he intends to do that to the whole of government.

Election Day is less than four months away. The case against Mr. Trump is extensive, and this board urges Americans to perform a simple act of civic duty in an election year: Listen to what Mr. Trump is saying, pay attention to what he did as president and allow yourself to truly inhabit what he has promised to do if returned to office.

Voters frustrated by inflation and immigration or attracted by the force of Mr. Trump’s personality should pause and take note of his words and promises. They have little to do with unity and healing and a lot to do with making the divisions and anger in our society wider and more intense than they already are.

The Republican Party is making its choice next week; soon all Americans will be able to make their own choice. What would Mr. Trump do in a second term? He has told Americans who he is and shown them what kind of leader he would be.

When someone fails so many foundational tests, you don’t give him the most important job in the world.

From top, photographs and video by Damon Winter/The New York Times (2) and Jay Turner Frey Seawell (5).

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30+ Tagalog Swear Words That'll Leave You Speechless

Ever wondered about those words your language tutor never taught you? You know the ones I’m talking about - the spicy vocabulary that might make your Filipino friends gasp: the Tagalog curse words or “mga mura!”

Come on, admit it.

We’ve all googled ‘naughty words’ in a new language at 2 AM. It’s practically a rite of passage for language learners! That’s why in this post, I’ll walk you through all the Tagalog bad words used by my fellow Pinoys in the Philippines. I aim to teach you not just Tagalog profanity, but when (and when not) to use it, how to react if someone drops it, and most importantly, how to avoid accidentally starting World War III at your next Filipino gathering.

Ready? Let’s begin!

Why Learn Filipino Swear Words?

As a Filipino, I believe learning our swear words can teach you a lot about our language and culture. These words reveal our history and what we value as a society, and each curse word has its own unique story.

In fact, many of our swear words come from Spanish and English, showing how these languages have shaped our own. But we also have unique swear words that stem from our religious background and formal way of speaking, giving our language its special flavor.

Understanding these words helps you grasp Filipino conversations better, whether you’re listening to Tagalog jokes or watching our Tagalog movies with friends. It’s not about using the words yourself - that’s definitely not the goal. Rather, it’s about truly understanding what’s being said and feeling more connected to our culture.

I’ve personally seen how this knowledge helps non-native speakers avoid awkward situations where they might use a word wrong. More importantly, it helps them understand why we communicate the way we do. It’s like having a special insight into how we Filipinos think and express ourselves.

Most Common Tagalog Swear Words

Putang ina mo.

“Putang Ina Mo” is a widely recognized Tagalog swear phrase in the Philippines, often shortened to 'ina mo' in casual speech. Translating to “Your mother is a whore,” it is a highly offensive and vulgar insult that targets the listener’s mother. It is often used to express extreme anger, frustration, or disdain.

Due to its strong derogatory nature, it is advised to avoid using this phrase in any context, especially around native speakers or in public settings.

Walang Hiya Ka

“Walang Hiya Ka” is a common Tagalog phrase that translates to “You have no shame” or “You’re shameless.” This insult is used to express strong disapproval or anger towards someone perceived as behaving disrespectfully, rudely, or immorally, essentially calling them 'walang hiya'.

Sounds a bit wordy, right? Let me breakdown this Tagalog curse word so you’ll understand it better.

The phrase “Walang Hiya” directly means “no shame”
Adding “ka” makes it personal, targeting the individual

Bwisit Ka” or “Buwisit” is a Tagalog expression used to convey annoyance, frustration, or anger. Translating roughly to “You’re a nuisance” or “You bring bad luck,” it is often used to describe someone or something that causes irritation or misfortune.

The term “Buwisit” alone can refer to anything unpleasant or troublesome, while adding “Ka” makes it a direct insult towards a person. More importantly, remember that this phrase is commonly used in everyday Filipino conversations, which is why sometimes this is used as a jokingly banter among friends, much like other swear words.

“Tanga” is a Tagalog word that translates to “stupid” or “foolish” in English. It is used to insult someone’s intelligence or decisions, implying that the person is lacking common sense or understanding. Just a warning though, this term is highly offensive and should be used with caution, as it can hurt or provoke the person being called “Tanga.”

Gago / Gaga

“Gago” (male) and “Gaga” (female) are Filipino swear words that translate to “stupid” or “fool” in English. These words are used to insult someone’s intelligence or actions, implying that the person is acting foolishly or senselessly. Both terms are highly offensive and can provoke strong reactions, so they should be used with extreme caution.

Tangina Mo / Tang Ina Mo

“Tangina” is a Tagalog swear word that is a contraction of “Putang Ina,” often expressed as 'tang ina mo', which translates to “Your mother is a whore.” It is an extremely offensive phrase used to express intense anger, frustration, or disdain.

“Puta” is a Tagalog word that directly translates to “whore” or “prostitute” in English, often used in the phrase 'putang ina'. It is a highly offensive term used to insult someone’s character by implying they are immoral or sexually promiscuous.

As a Filipino, I need to warn you that this word carries a strong negative connotation and is considered extremely vulgar in Filipino culture.

Bobo / Boba

“Bobo” (male) and “Boba” (female) are terms in the Tagalog language that translate to “stupid” or “dumb” in English. These words are used to insult someone’s intelligence, suggesting they are slow-witted or lacking in understanding.

“Buang” is a Tagalog term that translates to “crazy” or “insane” in English. It is used to describe someone as mentally unstable or acting irrationally. In Filipino culture, calling someone “Buang” is highly offensive and stigmatizing, as it trivializes mental health issues and can deeply hurt the person being labeled.

The tricky thing about this term is that it carries a strong negative connotation to the point that it can lead to social exclusion or conflict, similar to 'sira ulo ka'.

“Putragis” is a Tagalog expletive that is a milder derivative of “Putang Ina,” often used to express frustration, annoyance, or surprise. It translates more closely to “darn it” or “dang it” in English.

While less offensive than its origin, it still carries a negative tone and can be considered disrespectful if used inappropriately. In Filipino culture, using “Putragis” casually among friends might be acceptable, but it is best avoided in formal or respectful settings, much like other Tagalog bad words.

“Hayop Ka” is a Tagalog phrase that translates to “You animal” in English, often expressed as 'hayop ka'. It is used to insult someone by implying they are behaving in a savage, inhuman, or extremely disrespectful manner. In Filipino culture, this phrase is highly derogatory and is typically reserved for grave offenses such as cheating in relationships, betrayal, or acts of extreme cruelty.

Batugan is a Tagalog word meaning “lazy” or “good-for-nothing.” It’s commonly used to describe someone who avoids work or responsibilities. While this is a harsh criticism to use, what I personally love about this Tagalog swear word is that it shows our society’s emphasis on diligence and contribution to family and community, unlike 'wala kang kwenta'.

While less offensive than some other swear words, “lintik” is still considered impolite in formal settings. Basically, this term can be used on its own as an exclamation or directed at someone, similar to “damn it” or “damn you” in English. Its usage reflects the Filipino tendency to draw curse words from nature, much like 'mga punyeta kayo'.

Putik / Potek

Putik or Potek is a mild Tagalog expletive derived from the word for "mud." It's commonly used as a substitute for stronger swear words, particularly in situations where one wants to express frustration without being too offensive.

Unlike some other Filipino curses, "putik" doesn't have a specific target or meaning beyond being an expression of annoyance. It's often used by people trying to curb their language, similar to saying "sugar" instead of stronger words in English.

Sira Ulo Ka

Literally translated, "sira" means broken, "ulo" means head, and "ka" means you, this Filipino swear word means "you're crazy" or "you're out of your mind." It's often used to express disbelief at someone's actions or ideas, ranging from playful teasing to genuine frustration.

Wala Kang Kwenta

This expression is used to severely criticize someone's actions, abilities, or character as this means "You're worthless" or "You're useless." It's considered a serious insult and is typically used in anger or during intense arguments. While not strictly a swear word, it's highly offensive and should be avoided in most situations.

Syet / Shet

Syet or Shet is a Tagalog slang term derived from the English swear word "shit." It's a milder, more socially acceptable version used to express frustration, surprise, or disappointment. Technically, it's considered less offensive than its English counterpart and is often used in casual conversations among friends or in pop culture.

"Ulol" can range from a playful tease among close friends to a serious insult when said in anger. It's more offensive than milder terms like "sira ulo" but less severe than explicit swear words. While common in casual speech, it's considered impolite in formal settings or when addressing strangers.

In Tagalog, "Kupal" is a harsh insult comparable to calling someone a "jerk" or "scumbag" in English. Its literal meaning refers to a bodily secretion, adding to its vulgarity. Filipinos use this term to describe someone behaving in an extremely unpleasant or despicable way.

Hudas, derived from the biblical figure Judas Iscariot, is a Tagalog insult meaning "traitor" or "backstabber." When someone's labeled as "Hudas," you now know that it's a scathing accusation of disloyalty or betrayal. While not explicitly a swear word, its use can be just as impactful.

Leche, borrowed from the Spanish word for "milk," has taken on a completely different meaning in Tagalog. It's a versatile swear word Filipinos use to express frustration or anger. Think of it as the Filipino equivalent of "damn" or "crap."

While not the strongest curse word, it's definitely not polite conversation. You might hear it when someone stubs their toe or gets stuck in traffic. It can be used alone as an exclamation or directed at someone who's annoying you.

"Burat" is a crude Tagalog term for the male genitalia. It's considered a very vulgar and offensive word in Filipino culture, roughly equivalent to "dick" in English, but often perceived as even stronger.

Mga Punyeta Kayo / Punyeta Ka

"Mga Punyeta Kayo" (plural) or "Punyeta Ka" (singular) is a strong Tagalog curse phrase. "Punyeta" comes from Spanish, originally meaning "little fist," but in Tagalog it's used like "damn" or "son of a b****."

When you add "Mga" (plural marker) and "Kayo" (you all) or "Ka" (you), it becomes a direct insult: "You're all damned" or "You're damned."

Filipinos might use this when extremely angry or frustrated with people. It's definitely not for polite company - you won't hear it in formal settings or family gatherings (unless things go really wrong).

It's used to call someone an idiot, jerk, or all-around troublemaker. Think of it as the Filipino version of calling someone a "moron" but with extra spice. You might hear "Tarantado!" yelled at bad drivers or used to criticize someone's ridiculous behavior.

Ungas is a Tagalog insult that's like calling someone a dimwit or a bonehead. It's not the harshest swear word out there, but it's definitely not a compliment.

Imagine you're watching your friend try to open a door by pushing when there's a big "PULL" sign. That's when you might hear someone mutter "Ungas!" under their breath.

This word is pretty versatile. It can be a playful jab between friends or a more serious insult when you're really frustrated with someone's actions. You won't hear it in formal speeches or polite company, but it's common in casual conversations and arguments.

Hinayupak is a flavorful Tagalog curse word that packs a punch. It's like calling someone a "son of an animal" or a "beast," but with extra Filipino zest. While it's not the most extreme swear word, it's still pretty harsh. Think of it as a step up from calling someone crazy, but not quite as bad as some other Filipino curses.

Pucha is a milder Tagalog swear word, kind of like saying "darn" or "shoot" in English. It's the toned-down cousin of stronger curses, making it more socially acceptable in casual settings.

This word likely evolved from the Spanish "puta" (a strong profanity), but Filipinos have softened it for everyday use. You'll hear "Pucha!" when someone's frustrated or surprised, but not furious enough for heavier swears.

Pesteng Yawa

Pesteng Yawa is a colorful Visayan expression that's made its way into Tagalog. It's like a double whammy of frustration, combining "peste" (pest) and "yawa" (devil). You might hear "Pesteng yawa!" when someone's computer crashes or they burn their dinner. It's too strong for formal settings but common in casual talk, especially in the Visayas and among Tagalog speakers with Visayan connections.

Pakshet is a uniquely Filipino twist on swearing that blends English and Tagalog. It's a mash-up of the English "f ck" and the Tagalog "shet" (itself derived from "sh t"), creating a milder, more playful curse word. It's the go-to expletive for Filipino youth and young adults, often peppered through casual conversations or social media posts.

"Pakyu ka" is a Tagalog insult that's essentially the Filipino way of saying "F*ck you." It's a prime example of how English profanity gets a local makeover in Philippine slang. This phrase combines "Pak," a shortened version of the English F-word, with "yu" (you) and "ka" (Tagalog for "you"). It's like English swearing put through a Filipino filter.

Puke Ng Ina Mo

This phrase is an extremely vulgar and disrespectful insult in Filipino culture, involving a person's mother in a highly inappropriate way. Why? Well, this literally translates to "your mother's vagina!"

"Supot" in Tagalog literally means "plastic bag," but it's also used as a crude insult. It refers to an uncircumcised male, which in Filipino culture can be seen as a jab at someone's masculinity.

This term reflects the cultural importance of circumcision in the Philippines, where it's often considered a rite of passage for boys. Calling someone "supot" implies they're immature or not fully a man.

Kainin Mo Tae Ko

"Kainin mo tae ko" is an extremely vulgar and offensive phrase in Tagalog. It involves a graphic reference to bodily waste and is considered one of the most disrespectful things you can say to someone in Filipino culture.

Tired of saying "hayop ka?" Then meet your new favorite curse word in the Tagalog language: Animal ka! "Animal Ka" in Tagalog literally translates to "You're an animal," but it packs a stronger punch than its English counterpart. This insult is used to call someone uncivilized, brutish, or lacking human decency.

Expand Your Language Skills with Lingopie

Now that you've explored the colorful world of Tagalog expressions, why stop there? There's a whole globe of fascinating languages waiting for you to discover. And guess what? Learning them can be just as entertaining as picking up Filipino slang!

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The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden

The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters..

President Joe Biden walked before a row of flags and took his place at a lectern stamped with the presidential seal. A few feet in front of him, thin panes of teleprompter glass, programmed with prewritten remarks, were positioned to meet his stare as he spoke into a microphone that would carry his voice through a soundsystem. His White House press secretary looked on. So did several senior White House officials. Anxiety clung to the humid summer air. What the president was about to say might determine the future of his presidency and perhaps the Republic itself.

Yet this was not to be some grand pronouncement about war or peace or a shift in domestic policy. He was not delivering an official address or even a rally speech. He was not onstage in a stadium or auditorium or perched on a platform in a gilded government or hotel ballroom. He was not speaking to a crowd of thousands or even hundreds. There would be no video of his statement carried live to the world. There would be no photos. And there would be no published audio.

In a tent on the backyard patio of a private home in suburban New Jersey, the president was eye to eye with a small group of powerful Democrats and rich campaign donors, trying to reassure them that he was not about to drop dead or drop out of the presidential race.

The content of his speech would matter less than his perceived capacity to speak coherently at all, though much of what he would say would not be entirely decipherable. His words as always had a habit of sliding into a rhetorical pileup, an affliction that had worsened in the four years since he began running for president for the third time in 2020. He might begin a sentence loud and clear and then, midway through, sound as if he was trying to recite two or three lines all at once, his individual words and syllables dissolving into an incoherent gurgle.

Still, he was fine, he told the donors. Old, sure. But fine. He was here, wasn’t he? Things were actually going well by the numbers. The polls looked good. The money looked good. They were looking right at him. He looked pretty good for 81, no? Really, folks! And what choice did they have? As he liked to say, “As my father liked to say: Joey, don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative. ” In total, his remarks would last for exactly ten minutes — long enough to inspire confidence in his abilities, advisers hoped, but not so long that he was at increased risk of calling those abilities further into question.

As always with this president, the production surrounding any public appearance — even if it was semi-private — came down to timing and control. He could not spend too much time out in the wild, and the circumstances in which he could exist in such an environment with so many wobbly variables would need to be managed aggressively. According to rules set by the White House, the traveling protective pool — the rotating group of reporters, run by the White House Correspondents’ Association, that trails a sitting president to provide constant coverage of his movements for the press corps — would be permitted limited access to observe his remarks before being whisked away from the reception, or “wrangled,” in communications parlance, and held elsewhere on the property (in a guest house, where somebody tuned an old television set to Real Time With Bill Maher ).

Obsessive efforts to control Biden were not a new phenomenon. But whereas in the last campaign, the incredible stagecraft surrounding even the smallest Biden event — speaking to a few people at a union hall in rural Iowa, say, or in a barn in New Hampshire — seemed to be about avoiding the so-called gaffes that had become for him inevitable, the stagecraft of the 2024 campaign seems now to be about something else. The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there.

The display early Saturday evening was the last of seven campaign events held across four states in the 48 hours that followed the first presidential debate. The events were designed to serve as both proof of life for concerned wealthy patrons of the Biden reelection effort and proof of the wisdom of their choices: Other concerned wealthy people were still buying. They didn’t need to panic.

The sprawling Red Bank estate on a hill overlooking the Navesink River belonged to Goldman Sachs executive turned governor Phil Murphy. The local press had reported that hundreds were expected to attend the event. Though the $10 million property could have easily accommodated such a crowd, it was more like 50. Fewer if you subtract official staff or members of the Biden family, including the First Lady and several grandchildren. But big money comes in small packs, and Tammy Murphy, the governor’s wife, began her remarks with an unusual announcement: The couple had raised $3.7 million with their fundraiser, a number that had exceeded their goal. “This is personal for us,” the governor said. “We’re all with you 1,000 percent.” He called Biden “America’s comeback kid.” The callback to Bill Clinton articulated the nervous, defensive energy that animated the evening. But Biden had not face planted in a pit of bad press because of a mistake in his personal life. His problems would be much trickier to solve. A sex scandal might help him right now, in fact.

The president had approached the lectern with his stiff gait, which his official medical report, written by Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who has led his care since he was vice-president, attributes to a foot injury and an arthritic spine.

“I’d like to make three quick points,” Biden said. “Today we announced, since the debate, which wasn’t my best debate ever, as Barack points out, we raised $27 million.” It has long been a feature of Biden speeches to refer to the former president in this familiar way. “Barack and me” is a frequent refrain, a reminder of his service to the nation’s first Black president and a promise, too, of a return to normalcy after the aberrant rise of Donald Trump.

Although large speakers lined the patio, and although Governor and Mrs. Murphy were perfectly audible in their remarks, understanding Biden’s speech required intense focus. “POTUS was difficult to hear at times,” Tyler Pager of the Washington Post , assigned to circulate his statements in real time as the print pooler, wrote. “So please check the transcript.” The pool reporters often struggle with the challenge of how hard it is to hear or make sense of the president. Radio reporters do not always obtain usable audio of his remarks. Print reporters squint and strain and crane their necks, trying to find the best position by which their ears may absorb the vibration of his voice in the air. Reporters scrutinize their audio recordings and read quotes to one another after the fact. Is that what he said? You heard it? In that order? You sure?

Biden continued on: “Secondly, I understand the concern after the debate. I get it. We didn’t have a great night, but we’re working hard and we’re going to be working to get it done … Since the debate, the polls show a little movement and have me up a couple points.”

The donors broke into thunderous applause when the president said this about the polls. But what he said was false. Early public surveys immediately following the debate indicated that Biden was down overall a point or two, and surveys that asked respondents to rate the debate itself had him losing by mid–double digits. As a means of damage control, the campaign leaked some of its own internal polling — which had been until recently regarded as a state secret — to argue that the debate had not moved the needle: The president was losing by a slim margin before Thursday night, and he was still losing by that slim margin after Thursday night. In the days that followed, the polls would only grow grimmer .

“In fact,” Biden went on, “the big takeaway are Trump’s lies … The point is, I didn’t have a great night and neither did he.”

He returned to the central message of his campaign: “The fact is that Donald Trump is a genuine threat to democracy, and that’s not hyperbole. He’s a genuine threat. He’s a threat to our freedom, he’s a threat to our democracy, he’s literally a threat to America and what we stand for … Ask yourself the question: If not for America, who would lead the world?”

The question was posed as a reminder of the stakes of the November election. During his term in office, Trump had sought to retreat from America’s global commitments, abiding by a madman semi-isolationist theory of foreign policy that in Biden’s view and the view of many Establishment actors across the ideological divide had caused damage to the country’s reputation that will take a generation of stable leadership to undo.

Yet Biden’s comment also served as an unintentional reminder of the concerns about his own leadership. Just the day before, the Wall Street Journal had published a report that described how the president’s “frail” appearance and inconsistent “focus and performance” presented challenges on the world stage. At the G7 summit in Italy in June, Biden had the distinction of being the only world leader who did not attend a private dinner party where candid diplomatic talks would happen off-camera. At a European Union summit in Washington in October, Biden “struggled to follow the discussions” and “stumbled over his talking points” to such a degree that he required the intervention of Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (The White House denied the Journal ’s reporting.)

Under vines of white moonflowers on the governor’s patio, I watched as the president neared the end of his ten-minute speech. If a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, he was still making them. The truth he told now was this: “I’ve got a helluva lot of plans for the next four years — God willing, as my father used to say.”

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?

Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata. They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “ Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”

Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed. Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names. At a White House event last year, a guest recalled, with horror, realizing that the president would not be able to stay for the reception because, it was clear, he would not be able to make it through the reception. The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not really be the acting president after all.

Others told me the president was becoming increasingly hard to get ahold of, even as it related to official government business, the type of things any U.S. president would communicate about on a regular basis with high-level officials across the world. Biden instead was cocooned within mounting layers of bureaucracy, spoken for more than he was speaking or spoken to.

Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say “hello” to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “ So much worse!”

Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.

What I saw for myself confirmed something was amiss. I spent much of the spring, summer, and fall of 2020 on the primary campaign trail with Biden. In the period before he was granted Secret Service protection, his events, which were usually of modest size, were more freewheeling affairs, and reporters inched up to the candidate as he interacted with voters at the rope line. He rarely took questions. A teetotaler, he was not the kind of candidate who hung out at the hotel bar after the campaigning day was through (on occasion, Jill Biden would enjoy a glass of Pinot Noir in a Marriott lobby with her aides), but he was visible and closely observable.

A campaign trail is a grueling exercise for anybody of any age, from the youngest network embeds to the oldest would-be presidents, and back then, there were days when Biden appeared sharper than on others. I knew it was a good day when he saw me and winked. On such occasions, he joked and prayed and cried with voters. He stayed to take a photo with every supporter. He might even entertain a question or two from the press. He had color in his face. There was no question he was alive and present. On bad days, which were unpredictable but reliably occurred during a challenging news cycle, he was less animated. He stared off. He did not make eye contact. He would trip over his words, even if they were programmed in a teleprompter. On such occasions, he was hurried out of the venue quickly and ushered into a waiting SUV.

This April, at a reception before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I joined a sea of people waiting for a photo with the president and First Lady in the basement of the Washington Hilton. A photo line is a trauma. The main attraction must stand there, reduced to a human prop, with person after person, group after group, nodding and saying “hello” and flashing the same smile a zillion times so that guests leave the event with their little token commemorating their split second in proximity to history. People of all ages suffer in a photo line. It is tiring and unnatural, an icky transaction that requires robotic discipline on the part of its star and reveals primal horrors on the part of its participants. In Washington, even the most allegedly serious people can behave like pushy fangirls. So I grade photo-line behavior and performance on a curve. Who can be their best selves wedged into such a nightmarish dynamic? And in the basement of a Hilton, no less.

The first person I saw upon entering the subterranean space was the First Lady. I maintain personal fondness for Dr. Biden, whose controversial preferred honorific I am using out of respect. The day that my mother died, I happened to be traveling with her in Virginia, and when she learned about it, she was incredibly decent . She called to talk with me about grief, and she sent me a lovely note. The Bidens are famous for their willingness and ability to mourn with others, so I was not surprised exactly, but I was impressed, since among White House officials, members of the Biden family, and supporters of the president, I had always been treated with suspicion or outright contempt after my critical coverage of him during the 2020 campaign . I had written that there were “[c]oncerns, implicit or explicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for the next four years,” and that “[f]or political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.” Biden-world insiders did not appreciate that very much, and they never forgot or fully forgave it. I was particularly touched then by the First Lady’s kindness, and I always think of that when I see her.

In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …

I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.

I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.

Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.

This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.

For many inclined to support the president, this was good enough. They did not need to monitor the president’s public appearances, because under his leadership the country had returned to the kind of normal state in which members of a First World democratic society had the privilege to forget about the president for hours or days or even weeks at a time. Trump required constant observation. What did he just do? What would he do next? Oh God, what was he doing right at that moment? Biden could be trusted to perform the duties of his office out of sight. Many people were content to look away.

My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on . His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.

“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.

hard paywall
the power trip
trump-biden debate
the democratic party
phil murphy
tammy murphy
2024 election
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‘Never Trump guy’: VP nominee JD Vance has had harsh words for Donald Trump in the past

Updated: Jul. 15, 2024, 4:13 p.m.
| Published: Jul. 15, 2024, 4:06 p.m.

Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, right, points toward Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio. (Jeff Dean | AP Photo) Jeff Dean | AP Photo

Jeremy Pelzer, cleveland.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio — U.S. Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice president in 2024, has been one of Trump’s fiercest defenders since the Ohio Republican successfully ran for the Senate in 2022.

But when Trump first ran for president in 2016, Vance made it clear that he was no Trump enthusiast, repeatedly attacking him in op-eds, interviews, and on social media.

JD Vance is VP pick

JD Vance addresses past Trump criticism, says on ‘Hannity’ that former president ‘changed my mind’
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Ohio has spawned many presidents, but not vice presidents. JD Vance would be the first to build his political career here

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164 Phrases and words You Should Never Use in an Essay—and ...
Use: "This essay will introduce the idea that…". Not: "This essay will introduce the new idea that…". Joint collaboration. Use: "This paper describes a collaboration between…". Not: "This paper describes a joint collaboration between…". Knowledgeable expert. Use: "Kotler is an expert in the field of marketing.".
125 Words and Phrases You Should Never Use in an Essay
Use "approximately" instead. absolute best. "Absolute" is redundant—just use "best." absolute worst. For the same reason as above, just use "worst." absolutely. Eliminate unnecessary adverbs in academic writing. absurd. Don't say something is absurd; show that it is by using logical argumentation.
20+ Words to Avoid Writing in Your Essay
7-11) "Thing," "stuff," "good," "bad," "big". The problem with these words is colloquiality and vagueness, inappropriate for academic language. It's okay to use them in everyday talk; but when in essays, they sound too elementary and make admission officers think of your poor vocabulary. Do your best to master paraphrasing ...
Words and Phrases to Avoid in Academic Writing
Words and Phrases to Avoid in Academic Writing. Published on February 6, 2016 by Sarah Vinz.Revised on September 11, 2023. When you are writing a dissertation, thesis, or research paper, many words and phrases that are acceptable in conversations or informal writing are considered inappropriate in academic writing.. You should try to avoid expressions that are too informal, unsophisticated ...
Words and Phrases to Avoid in your College Essays
6. Run-On Expressions. A run-on expression is a phrase, usually at the end of a list, that indicates you could add more examples (and so on, and so forth, etc.). Avoiding filler words and run-on expressions will make your college essay more clear and interesting to the reader.
33 Words not to use in your Essay (2024)
Set 2: Assertive Words not to use in an Essay. We don't completely, unequivocally, and unrefutably know anything. Therefore, nothing is ever 'confirmed'. Even the 'Theory' of gravity is just a theory - and indeed, it's changed and been updated many, many times since Isaac Newton got hit on the head by that apple.
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College Essay Execution Problems To Avoid. Bad college essays aren't only caused by bad topics. Sometimes, even if you're writing about an interesting, relevant topic, you can still seem immature or unready for college life because of the way you present that topic—the way you actually write your personal statement.
Words to Avoid in Academic Writing
Here are some imprecise words to avoid in academic writing. Vague word (s) Replacement (s) Example. a bit. Specify the exact amount. The experiment required a bit 10 mg of catalyst. a couple of/some. Specify the exact amount or replace with many, several, a number of.
Words to Avoid in an Essay
Below, there is a list of words to avoid in an essay. Bookmark it and you will learn to create sound academic papers deserving top grades. We Write Online +1(888)414-0276 +1(888)414-0276. What we do; Our process; ... Bad (poor quality, sad, unacceptable, inferior, deficient, imperfect).
15 Words you Should Never use in a College Admissions Essay
Hate: instead of explicitly saying how you felt, you should paint a picture of the circumstance that led you to feel that way. Swag: Slang is not "lit" in a college admissions essay. Lachrymose (or other SAT words you don't really know): Don't use big SAT vocab to impress your reader.
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We should perform a local test before applying the new method to our system. [14 words] As shown in the examples above, eliminating filler words can significantly reduce your word count! On average, we've cut the word count of the sentences above by 25-30%. Look at your most recent writing. Now imagine it 25-30% leaner by eliminating fillers ...
Words to Avoid in Essay for Effective Writing
It would be best to avoid words like " sure ," " absolutely ," " obviously ," "of course," "absolutely," "perfectly," or adjectives like "brilliant," "wonderful," and "terrific.". These words are used for emphasis but are often dramatic. They will indeed sound out of place in your essay. 10. Too Sophisticated.
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Strategy #3: Select the most precise word possible. Overused words are usually vague, offering the opportunity to replace them with a more-specific word that creates a stronger sentence. The precise replacement-word is not always a direct synonym for the original word. For example, a writer could replace the sentence I feel amazing with I feel ...
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In this article, we will explore 15 weak words that you should avoid in your essay writing. Very: Instead of using "very," opt for a more descriptive word that precisely conveys the intensity you intend. For example, replace "very happy" with "ecstatic" or "delighted." Thing: "Thing" is a vague term that lacks specificity.
17 Weak Words to Avoid in Your Writing
4. "totally," "completely," "absolutely". Like the previous words, these words don't add to the sentence and can often be removed. Try using actions to show the feelings instead. 5. "thing," "it". "Thing" is vague and weak. Instead, replace "thing" with whatever you are talking about. Do the same with it.
Common words to avoid when writing formally
Anyhow, avoid "kind of" and "sort of." That used to drive my English teachers crazy. Also avoid the verb "to be" when possible. Sometimes "to be" is the best option, but not as often as many people use it. If you can restate some "is adjective" as a verb, do it and see if it works. If it does, keep it.
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Clearly, the introduction and conclusion are vital components of a good essay, but they also bolster your word count. If you've started writing your essay by writing the 'body' of it first - constructing the points and argument - don't forget that the introduction and conclusion will add to the word count if you feel you've run ...
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Real college essay example: " The worst part about being the slowest runner on my school's cross country team is that I occasionally fall so far behind that I have to stop and ask for directions." 2. A Famous Quote. An essay that begins, "John F. Kennedy once said…" is already on the wrong track.
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6. Quite. Quite is another low-value modifying adverb. It is always a candidate for weak words to avoid in writing, and you can almost always replace it with far better alternatives. Oh, it was a fantastic holiday, but it was quite cold at night. Luckily we had a fireplace to keep us warm.
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A bad essay will prompt an admission officer to assume one of two things: 1) either you don't care enough about your future at their school to take the time to write a good essay or 2) you aren't academically up to attending their college or university. Neither of those assumptions will help you get admitted.
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Make sure that by the end of your essay, your reader knows what your opinion is. 3. The polemic. Try not to make your reader think of you shouting at them from a soapbox. The direct opposite of the "weighing scales" approach is the polemic. In this kind of essay, your reader is in no doubt at all about what your point of view is ...
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4. That is to say. Usage: "That is" and "that is to say" can be used to add further detail to your explanation, or to be more precise. Example: "Whales are mammals. That is to say, they must breathe air.". 5. To that end. Usage: Use "to that end" or "to this end" in a similar way to "in order to" or "so".
Words NOT to Use in an Essay and Replacement Options : r/studytips
Don't get me wrong: there are many possible scenarios of why a particular word may be a bad match for the essay's context. However, I can share a few of the most common word-related mistakes students make in essay writing. Top 5 most common vocabulary mistakes in academic writing.
Donald Trump Is Unfit for a Second Term
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Green: One word to 24% matching text; Yellow: 25-49% matching text; Orange: 50-74% matching text; Red: 75-100% matching text; Similarity Reports that have not yet finished generating are represented by a grayed out icon in the Similarity column. Reports that are not available may not have generated yet, or assignment settings may be delaying ...
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Leche, borrowed from the Spanish word for "milk," has taken on a completely different meaning in Tagalog. It's a versatile swear word Filipinos use to express frustration or anger. Think of it as the Filipino equivalent of "damn" or "crap." While not the strongest curse word, it's definitely not polite conversation.
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President Joe Biden walked before a row of flags and took his place at a lectern stamped with the presidential seal. A few feet in front of him, thin panes of teleprompter glass, programmed with ...
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COLUMBUS, Ohio — U.S. Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump's pick for vice president in 2024, has been one of Trump's fiercest defenders since the Ohio Republican successfully ran for the Senate in 2022.
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There are many reasons to explain whether Henry VIII was a good king or a bad king. Henry the VIII is known for his six wives and legendary appetite. He is known for the significant wars he fought in and he is one of the most written about kings in English. He was mostly known for his extreme punishment.
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If you've ever second-guessed yourself while trying to spell words like "beautiful," "receive," and "license," you're far from the only one. While we'll provide the correct spelling of 21 hard ...