How confident should a sentence in your paper sound? The honest answer: exactly as confident as your evidence lets you be — no more, no less. That’s the whole rule. Most of the “weak English” comments reviewers leave aren’t grammar problems at all. They’re confidence problems: a claim stated too timidly to be useful, or too boldly to be defensible.
This is where non-native writers get flagged most often, and it runs in both directions. Over-hedge and a reviewer reads “the results may possibly suggest a potential trend” and wonders why you’re not sure of your own data. Overclaim and they read “this proves that X causes Y” and reach for the rejection template before they’ve finished the sentence. Neither writer is wrong about the finding. Both are wrong about how much weight one sentence should carry.
The test: does the citation earn the claim?
Uni-edit’s Writing Tip 14 puts it plainly: a citation is not decoration at the end of a sentence, it’s the thing doing the evidential work. So before you soften or strengthen a claim, ask what’s actually behind it. One study, narrow scope, contested finding? Hedge, and hedge specifically. A finding that’s been replicated across the field? State it as fact and let the citation carry the confidence — you don’t also need “clearly” or “undoubtedly” stapled onto it.
Two ways to report a finding
Reporting verbs. “Show,” “demonstrate,” “report,” “found” — these attach a finding to whoever found it, which matters when the result is specific or still debated. Active voice does this better than passive: “Terahara et al. found that transcription factor Spi-B is specifically expressed by M cells (2008)” tells the reader who is claiming what. The passive version — “it has been found that Spi-B is expressed” — quietly drops the person making the claim, which is exactly the move a skeptical reviewer notices.
Fact plus citation. For a settled, field-wide point, you don’t need a verb at all. “M cells transport antigens across the intestinal epithelium (Neutra et al., 2001)” is a statement, not a claim you’re personally vouching for — the citation is doing that. Wrapping it in “it has been reported that” adds words without adding certainty.
The tip also flags a smaller, useful trick: enumerating. “One study found…” reads differently from “several studies have found…”, and neither requires you to name every paper. It’s a cheap, accurate way to signal how much the field agrees with you, before your reader even reaches the citation.
When disagreement is the finding
Sometimes the honest sentence is the uncertain one, and that’s not a weakness to edit out. If you’re corroborating a weak result, contradicting a prior study, or flagging an open debate in the field, say so directly — “in contrast to Smith et al. (2019), we found…” — rather than either burying the disagreement in hedges or overclaiming your way past it. A hedge that reflects real uncertainty is doing its job. A hedge that’s just there because the sentence felt too bare in translation is the one worth cutting.
The video covers the tense side of this — how the same finding reads differently in simple past versus present perfect. Worth five minutes if reporting-verb choice is new to you; the rest of this post is what to do once tense is settled and you’re deciding how much certainty the sentence should actually carry.
Where this quietly falls apart
Reference problems are the easiest thing for a reviewer to find and the least defensible when found — a mismatched year, a citation that doesn’t actually support the claim it’s attached to, a reference list entry that doesn’t match the in-text call. If your confidence rests on a citation, that citation has to survive a check. Uni-edit’s reference and citation checking service exists for exactly that gap — verifying every in-text citation against the reference list and the source itself, separately from a full language edit.
The wording problem — where hedges and reporting verbs sit relative to each claim — is what a full edit catches, because it needs someone reading the argument as a whole, not just checking each sentence in isolation. That’s the kind of pass Uni-edit’s Level 3 editing does: reading for where a claim overreaches its evidence or undersells it, alongside the language itself.
This idea sits inside a longer chapter, “How to Write to Publish Internationally,” if you want the fuller treatment with more worked examples. And if you’d rather have one of these land in your inbox before you need it, Uni-edit’s writing and publication emails cover this kind of thing regularly.
A course on this, if enough people want one
Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.
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