Correct but Awkward

Learning outcomes

You send a Slack message: “Due to the fact that the build is failing, I am writing to inform you that I will be unable to deploy at this point in time.” Every word is correct. A grammar checker waves it through. And yet a teammate types back, “build’s red, can’t deploy yet,” and their version lands like a person talking while yours lands like a memo from a machine. Nothing you wrote was wrong. It was just awkward, and awkward has reasons you can name and fix.

After studying this page, you can:

• Tell apart three different verdicts on a sentence: incorrect, awkward, and natural, and explain why awkward is its own category.
• Diagnose the six recurring causes of awkwardness, redundancy, over-formality, over-explicitness, bad intensifiers, dead connectors, and the heavy-noun style, and fix a sentence by naming its cause.
• Run a quick decision procedure on any suspect sentence to find which cause is in play.
• Hear awkwardness in your own draft using the read-aloud test, the native-rephrase test, and a corpus check.
• Judge when an awkward-sounding phrase is actually acceptable, because formality and fit, not a fixed rulebook, decide.

Before we dive in

Most English advice sorts sentences into two bins: right and wrong. You learned to chase the wrong ones, the missing article, the verb that does not agree, the preposition the textbook forbids. That skill takes you far. Then it stops helping, because the sentences that hold you back at an advanced level are not in the wrong bin at all. They are fully grammatical. They pass every check. And they still make a native speaker quietly rewrite them.

This is the third verdict, the one between right and wrong: awkward. An awkward sentence breaks no rule of grammar, so no tool flags it and no colleague corrects it. It breaks a rule of fit. It uses more words than the thought needs, or a register heavier than the room, or a connector that exists in textbooks and nowhere else. The meaning still arrives, but it arrives wearing a stiff suit to a casual lunch.

The good news mirrors the bad. Because awkwardness has rules of its own, it has causes you can name, and a named cause has a fix. Almost every awkward sentence an advanced speaker produces traces back to one of six habits. Once you can spot which habit is firing, the repair is usually mechanical: cut the redundant phrase, drop the register, delete the obvious, swap the dead connector, free the buried verb. The rest of this page teaches the six, then teaches you how to hear them in your own writing before anyone else does.

The six causes of awkwardness

Awkwardness feels like one vague thing, a sentence that is somehow “off,” but it is really six specific habits. Each is a different way a grammatical sentence can still misfire. Before we take them one at a time, here is the whole set in one view: an awkward sentence on the left, the natural version a native would reach for in the middle, and the diagnosable cause on the right. Read down the middle column and the friction lifts; read the right column and you learn to name why.

Notice that no row on the left is grammatically broken. Each one would survive a proofread. What each one fails is the fit test, and the right column gives that failure a name. The six subsections below take each cause in turn, show it on a concrete case, and hand you the fix.

1. Redundancy and wordiness

The first and most common cause is redundancy: the sentence carries words that add nothing the rest of the sentence has not already said. A fixed phrase swells where a single word would do, and the reader pays for the extra words with no gain in meaning. “In order to” is just “to” with three words of packing foam around it. “Due to the fact that” is “because” wearing a disguise. “At this point in time” is “now,” stretched to five times its length.

The fix is subtraction, and subtraction alone. You are not finding better words; you are deleting words that earn nothing. Watch what happens when you cut: “In order to deploy, we needed approval” loses nothing as “To deploy, we needed approval.” The meaning is identical and the sentence is lighter. This is the cheapest improvement in all of English writing, because it costs you only the courage to delete.

The table below collects the worst offenders, the bloated phrase and the one or two words that replace it whole. Keep this list in your head and you will catch most of your own redundancy on the second read.

Two of these hide a second, deeper redundancy. “The reason why is because” says “reason,” “why,” and “because,” three words for one idea of cause, where a single “because” carries all of it. “Absolutely essential” pretends to intensify, but “essential” already means “absolutely necessary,” so the intensifier doubles a meaning the word owns. Whenever a modifier repeats what its noun or adjective already says, cut the modifier. The full case for cutting words like this, and the rhythm you gain by doing it, is the heart of the principles of clear prose.

2. Over-formality in a casual setting

The second cause is register: the sentence is pitched at a formality the situation does not call for. This is not about being wrong; the formal phrasing is often perfectly correct and would be ideal in a contract or a court filing. It is wrong for the room. “Would you be so kind as to merge my pull request?” is flawless English. Dropped into a team Slack channel between two engineers who sit next to each other, it reads as stiff, distant, even faintly sarcastic, because nobody talks to a peer that way.

Everyday English at work, especially on chat, runs far more casual than the English a textbook teaches. The polite-but-cold phrasings you were drilled in, “I would be most grateful if,” “kindly find attached,” “would you be so kind as to,” belong to formal letters, not to a message you fire off between commits. Using them in a casual channel is like wearing a tuxedo to stand-up: technically fine clothing, wrong event.

The fix is to match the dial to the setting. On Slack, “could you merge my PR when you get a chance?” or just “mind merging this?” is not lazier English; it is more accurate English, because it fits. The skill of reading the situation and choosing the formality level it wants is its own subject, developed in register-specific vocabulary.

3. Over-explicitness, stating the obvious

The third cause is over-explicitness: the sentence spells out something the reader already knows, can already see, or has already inferred. The words are not wrong; they are simply unnecessary, and the reader feels mildly talked-down-to for being told what they did not need telling. “I am writing this email to tell you that the deploy is done” announces the act of writing inside the writing, which the reader can plainly see is happening. Just say “the deploy is done.”

The classic markers of this habit are throat-clearing openers that add no information: “As we all know,” “It goes without saying that,” “Needless to say,” “I am writing to inform you that.” Each one is a runway with no plane on it. If everyone already knows it, you do not need to say “as we all know”; you can just say the thing, or, often, cut it entirely because the reader already had it. If it truly goes without saying, then let it go without saying.

The fix is to delete the preamble and lead with the content. “As we all know, the cache can serve stale data, so we should add a TTL” becomes “The cache can serve stale data, so let’s add a TTL.” The point arrives a half-second sooner and the reader is treated as a peer, not a student. Over-explicitness and over-formality often travel together in the same stiff email, but they are different faults: one is the wrong volume of words, the other the wrong level of dress.

4. Unnatural intensifiers and degree

The fourth cause is the intensifier that does not fit the word it modifies. English is fussy about which booster pairs with which kind of word, and a learner’s home language often allows a pairing English quietly refuses. The most common is “very” with a verb. You can say “I very much like it,” but not “I very like it”; “very” modifies adjectives and adverbs, not bare verbs, so the natural booster for a verb is “really”: “I really like it.”

A second trap is the redundant intensifier on an absolute adjective. Some adjectives name an all-or-nothing quality that cannot take a degree: “unique” means one of a kind, so “very unique” claims something is more one-of-a-kind than one-of-a-kind, which is meaningless. The same goes for “perfect,” “essential,” “complete,” and “final.” Drop the booster: “unique,” not “very unique.” A third trap is reaching for the weak generic booster when a stronger, more exact one exists. “I very much agree” works, but “I completely agree” or “I fully agree” lands harder and sounds more native.

The chart below counts how often a few of these forms actually show up in real usage, to make the point concrete: the awkward forms are not just frowned on, they are genuinely rare, while the natural ones are everywhere.

The bars make the lesson visible: “really like” and “truly unique” tower over “very like” and “very unique,” and that gap is exactly the signal a native ear is responding to without thinking about it. When your phrasing sits on a tiny bar, it is awkward not because a rule forbids it but because almost nobody says it. We will turn that frequency intuition into a deliberate corpus check later on this page.

5. Calqued discourse and dead connectors

The fifth cause is the connector or framing phrase that exists in formal or translated English but that no native actually says in normal prose. These are often calques, structures lifted whole from another language or from a stiff academic register, that arrive grammatically intact but socially dead. “It is to be noted that,” “As is well known,” “We can say that,” and “It is worth mentioning that” all sound like they belong to writing, but native writers reach for shorter, livelier moves instead.

The fix is to replace the dead connector with a live one, or to cut it entirely. “It is to be noted that the cache expires hourly” becomes “Note that the cache expires hourly,” or simply “The cache expires hourly,” since the framing added nothing. “We can say that the rollback worked” becomes “The rollback worked.” The dead connector is almost always a delay before the real sentence; deleting it lets the real sentence start.

These constructions are close cousins of the word-level calques covered in calques natives never say; the difference is that those are single words borrowed wrong, while these are whole connective phrases. Both share one tell: they feel translated, like a phrase that was correct somewhere else and carried over unchanged. The diagram-level diagnostic in the next section will help you catch them.

6. The heavy-noun style that buries the verb

The sixth and most advanced cause is the nominal style: writing that turns its verbs into nouns and then needs weak helper verbs to prop them up. The action of the sentence, which a verb should carry, gets frozen into an abstract noun, and the sentence grows heavy and slow. “The implementation of the optimization led to a reduction in latency” hides three real verbs, implement, optimize, reduce, inside the nouns “implementation,” “optimization,” and “reduction,” and then leans on the limp verb “led to” to connect them.

The fix is to find the buried verbs and set them free. Ask what actually happened, then say it with the action as a verb: “we optimized it, which made the service faster,” or tighter still, “optimizing it cut the latency.” The sentence drops from a chain of abstract nouns to a clear actor doing a clear thing. Heavy-noun writing is grammatical and even sounds impressive at first, which is why it survives into advanced English, but it makes the reader work to dig the action back out.

The before-and-after below shows the move on three workplace sentences. Read the left column and feel the drag; read the right and notice the verb come back to life.

Read down the right column and one habit repeats: each fix turns a noun back into the verb it came from and lets that verb carry the sentence. This is the single biggest lever in plain professional writing, and it has a whole page of its own; the deeper mechanics and more cases live in the principles of clear prose.

A diagnostic you can run on any sentence

The six causes are easier to use as a checklist than to recall by name. When a sentence feels off but you cannot say why, run it through the questions below in order. The first “yes” you hit names the cause and points to the fix, so you rarely need to check all six.

The order is deliberate. The cheapest and most common faults, redundancy and over-formality, come first, because catching them resolves most awkwardness with the least effort. The subtler faults, dead connectors and the heavy-noun style, come last, because they are rarer and need a more trained ear. Running the same sentence through this ladder a few dozen times builds the instinct to skip the ladder entirely and hear the cause directly.

How to hear awkwardness before a reader does

Naming the six causes only helps if you can catch them in your own draft, where they are hardest to see because you wrote them and they sound like you. Three habits train that ear, and they get more reliable in this order.

The first and most powerful is the read-aloud test. Read your sentence out loud, or sub-vocalize it as if speaking. Awkwardness that is invisible on the page becomes audible in the mouth: you stumble over “in order to facilitate the implementation,” you run out of breath in a heavy-noun chain, your voice goes stiff and unnatural on “would you be so kind as to.” Your ear has absorbed thousands of hours of natural English even if your eye has not, so the spoken version routes the sentence past a much better judge. If you would never say it to a colleague’s face, do not write it.

The second is the native-rephrase test. Ask yourself, in plain terms, “how would I say this to a teammate standing next to me?” The spoken-to-a-peer version is almost always the natural one, because speech strips out the padding, the over-formality, and the dead connectors that creep into writing. If your written sentence and your spoken version differ a lot, the written one is probably the awkward one, and the spoken one shows you the fix. This is the same instinct that underlies why natives choose one phrase over another: the natural choice is usually the one a person would actually say.

The third is the corpus check, for when you are unsure whether a specific phrase is real. Search the exact phrase in quotes in a search engine, or in a corpus tool, and look at how often it appears and in what kind of writing. A natural phrase returns millions of hits across ordinary prose; an awkward calque returns few, or only formal and translated sources. This is the deliberate version of the frequency intuition the intensifier chart showed earlier: “very unique” and “it is to be noted that” simply do not show up much in the way natives actually write, and that scarcity is your evidence.

Mental Model: awkward is not wrong, it is unfit

Here is the reframe that ties the page together and corrects the most damaging misconception. The wrong model is that awkward sentences are a milder kind of mistake, a lesser version of incorrect, so the goal is to eliminate them everywhere the way you eliminate grammar errors. Under that model, every formal phrase is a fault to be purged, and you end up afraid to write “in the event that” even in a legal clause where it belongs.

The better model is that awkwardness is not about correctness at all; it is about fit. A sentence is awkward when its register, length, or phrasing does not match the situation it lands in, and the very same sentence can be perfectly natural in a different situation. “Would you be so kind as to confirm receipt” is awkward in a Slack message to a peer and entirely appropriate in a formal letter to a regulator. “Due to the fact that” is bloated in an email but acceptable in a careful legal document where the slight emphasis earns its length. The phrasing did not change; the fit did.

This is why the read-aloud and native-rephrase tests work where a rulebook fails. They do not ask “is this phrase on the forbidden list?” They ask “does this sound like something a person would say in this situation?”, which is the fit question wearing everyday clothes. Train the fit question and you no longer need the list, because you can judge any phrase, even one you have never seen, against the room it has to live in.

Common mistakes

The first mistake is treating awkward as a synonym for wrong, and so over-correcting. Once you learn that “in order to” is usually padding, it is tempting to hunt and kill every formal phrase everywhere. But several of these forms are exactly right in formal writing, and stripping all formality from a contract or a regulatory filing produces its own kind of awkwardness, prose too casual for its setting. The fix is to judge by fit, not by a banned-words list.

The second mistake is the deepest cause of all six, and it deserves naming on its own: trying to sound impressive by adding words. Many advanced learners, sensing that simple English sounds too plain, reach for more formality, more abstract nouns, more elaborate connectors, believing that complexity signals competence. It signals the opposite. The most respected professional writers write the plainest sentences, because they trust the idea to carry itself without padding. Every one of the six causes is, at root, a way of adding words the thought did not need. The cure is the courage to write it short.

The third mistake is fixing one cause while introducing another. A learner who learns to cut “due to the fact that” may replace it with the equally awkward “owing to the fact that,” or free a buried verb only to bury a different one. The fix is to run the read-aloud test on the rewrite, not just the original, and to check that the repaired sentence actually sounds like speech, because a fix that still fails the read-aloud test has not fixed anything.

The fourth mistake is waiting for someone to point the awkwardness out. As with everything in this domain, awkward English is understood, so almost no one corrects it; your teammate quietly rewrites your idea in their reply and moves on. If you wait to be told, you will wait forever. The signal has to be self-generated, by reading your own drafts aloud and noticing where your mouth resists what your hand wrote.

Mastery Questions