>Avoid absolutist language. It's not "the main problem", it's "a problem". (Unless, of course, you can defend the claim.)<p>I've started thinking this advice counterintuitively causes as many problems as it solves. I try to do it regularly (just had to stop myself now, unlike the author), but find that instead of the neutral, self-divorced report of discoveries academic style is designed to foster I just as easily end up with the overall structure still being my own opinion as drafted, but now much harder to read smoothly as it's clogged up by generic self-depreciating hedges and unjustly short summary references to other work I don't necessarily agree with anyway. It's also not how real science and study is actually done; Feynman famously did most of his progress on his work however he liked, and then only moved it to the formalisms of "academic research", so to speak, if he found most of what his hunch was looking for. I've been wondering whether it would be better to try out the other way and see if it can be made better instead of fighting it to find the right compromise of ingenuine humility. Perhaps write your own opinions on your sleeve, but use something like an asterisk to indicate a stylistic hedge you'd apply to something you only mostly know, or haven't completely reviewed to the same detail as the produced info that inspired you to the thesis, so the reader sees just where your head's at and makes up their own mind on whether it affected your conclusion too much, instead of having to guess between lines of alternatives or pull it out through teeth of qualifications. Plus whatever you seriously don't know a bit of and don't want to commit to will stand out all the more. Maybe pick out a less-used unicode punctuation for it, like the tombstone, or perhaps number them in the margins like mathematicians do with equations. As a bonus you could then attach an appendix as a numbered list that focuses as deep as you'd like on alternate possibilities and gaps in knowledge without drawing out the piece itself.<p>When I was learning music, my teacher insisted on giving just as much mental energy to the rests as to the notes, because even nominally the right melody loses its impact if it's allowed to sloppily over and underrun its rhythm, and doubly so for the harmony. A lot of "informational" style I try to read or write feels like just a long, flat run through the notes and chords its author needs out of an avoidance of expected criticism for expressing anything not buried under neutralizing boilerplate as uninformed, arrogant, or unsupported, but the reality is that sometimes that's how the sausage is made, and we do pupils and fellows trying to understand our work no favors when we put a curtain between them and the man at the machine.