Academic writing’s clankiest sounds come from its -tate verbs, like necessitate and facilitate, and its -shun nouns, like evaluation and function. The critic Richard Lanham calls such writing “mumblespeak” because the sounds are insufficiently distinct and you hear them as muffled noise-making. You can do a global search for -tate and -shun endings in your writing and cull them. But the quickest cure for mumblespeak is shorter words.
