Do us a favor - Keep it simple.

In the past few weeks I've had to read what can only be amounted to the worst writing of any kind.  I've read engineering books for fun, I've read reference books cover to cover.  The thing that frustrates me...  papers from social psychology.  Not due to the theme, I think it's fascinating stuff.  But how the people write is just obnoxious to no end.  So here's the basic lesson for those people who might later in life write for a living or for those old hats who may have over looked this simple rule of writing.  

If you find yourself typing the words - "In other words..." or "Specifically..." and sometimes, even "Thus..." stop for a second and think to yourself, do I need anything that was typed before those clarifiers?  You probably don't.  If you need to say something "In other words" then you probably didn't use the right ones the first time around.  Save your audience what could be the last few seconds of our conscious existence (at least for that day) the pain of having to read your attempts of writing the same thing four times and deciding to leave all four versions in the final paper.  If you type "Specifically" you should think - perhaps I should just have said it all to start with instead of "Ants are small.  Specifically they measure up to 2 cm in length in some areas".  Do you need the first part?  No, this isn't a bed time story, this also isn't a how many pointless words can you include contest, this is a journal article and you should be concise without giving people the impression that you just went through your thesaurus to try to make yourself look smart.  Don't do it.