How to Fix Awkward English Phrasing

Correct is not the same as natural

You run your draft through a grammar checker and it comes back clean. No red underlines, no flagged tenses, no subject-verb disagreements. And yet, when you read it back, something is off. The sentences are technically correct but they feel heavy, indirect, slightly mechanical. A native reader would never put it quite that way.

This is the phrasing gap, and it is the stage most non-native English writers get stuck at after grammar stops being the problem. Grammar governs whether a sentence is legal. Phrasing governs whether it sounds like a person who lives in the language. They are different skills, and grammar tools rarely touch the second one.

The good news: awkward phrasing follows a small number of repeating patterns. Once you can name them, you can fix them on sight. Here are the seven that account for most of the clunkiness, each with a fix you can apply in seconds.

1. Wrong collocations

A collocation is a pair of words that habitually travel together in English — "make a decision," "heavy rain," "strong coffee." There is no logic to enforce them. You just have to know that English says "make a mistake," not "do a mistake," even though both are grammatically fine. When you translate the verb directly from your first language, you land on the wrong half of the pair.

Awkward: "I did a mistake in the report and want to do a correction."

Smoother: "I made a mistake in the report and want to fix it."

Collocations are the single biggest tell of non-native phrasing. When a verb-noun pair feels guessed, look it up instead of trusting the direct translation. (More on the "translated" feeling in why your English sounds translated.)

2. Nominalizations (the "zombie noun")

A nominalization is an abstract noun built out of a verb — "decision" from "decide," "analysis" from "analyze," "consideration" from "consider." Writers reach for them because they sound formal. The cost is that the real action gets buried inside a noun, and you need an extra weak verb to prop it up.

Awkward: "The committee made a decision to give consideration to the proposal."

Smoother: "The committee decided to consider the proposal."

The fix is mechanical: find the abstract noun, dig out the verb hiding inside it, and let that verb do the work. The sentence almost always gets shorter and clearer at the same time.

3. Weak verb plus abstract noun

Closely related: phrases like "provide assistance," "have a discussion," "conduct an investigation," "make an improvement." Each is a colorless verb (provide, have, make, conduct) propping up a noun that was originally a perfectly good verb. One strong verb replaces the pair.

Awkward: "We need to provide assistance to the team and have a discussion about the timeline."

Smoother: "We need to help the team and discuss the timeline."

Whenever you write "make," "do," "have," "give," or "provide" followed by a noun, pause. There is usually a single verb that says it better.

4. Filler and wordiness

Some phrases add length without adding meaning. "In order to" is almost always just "to." "Due to the fact that" is "because." "At this point in time" is "now." "It is important to note that" can usually be deleted entirely — if it were not important, you would not be writing it.

Awkward: "In order to meet the deadline, it is important to note that we will need additional resources due to the fact that the scope increased."

Smoother: "To meet the deadline, we will need more resources because the scope increased."

Read each sentence and ask which words you could delete without losing meaning. Cut those. Tight writing reads as confident; padded writing reads as hesitant.

5. Preposition slips

Prepositions almost never translate one-to-one between languages, so they are a reliable source of small, persistent errors. You "depend on" someone, are "interested in" something, "good at" a skill, "married to" a person, and "responsible for" a task. None of these follow a rule you can derive — they are fixed pairings you memorize.

Awkward: "She is responsible of the budget and depends from her manager for approval."

Smoother: "She is responsible for the budget and depends on her manager for approval."

When a preposition feels like a guess, it probably is one. Confirm the standard pairing rather than mapping it from your native language.

6. Misused intensifiers

"Very," "really," and "quite" are crutches. They signal that the word they are propping up is too weak to stand alone. Most of the time, a sharper single word does the job better. "Very important" is "critical." "Really big" is "huge." "Very tired" is "exhausted."

Awkward: "The results were very good and the deadline is really important."

Smoother: "The results were excellent and the deadline is critical."

You do not have to ban intensifiers — sometimes "very" is exactly right. But when you stack them, treat each one as a flag pointing at a weak word that wants upgrading.

7. Stacked modifiers and run-on ideas

The "zombie sentence": three adjectives, two subordinate clauses, and a couple of nominalizations all loaded into one breath. Each piece is grammatical. Together they ask the reader to hold too much at once.

Awkward: "The newly implemented comprehensive customer onboarding process improvement initiative, which was developed in collaboration with the cross-functional stakeholder team, resulted in a significant reduction of churn."

Smoother: "We redesigned how new customers get onboarded, working with teams across the company. Churn dropped sharply."

One idea per sentence. When a sentence carries more than one, split it. Two clean sentences read faster than one dense one. (For the opposite failure — sentences that break apart — see sentence fragments and run-ons in English.)

Collocations cheat table

The combinations below trip up the most writers. The wrong version is usually a direct translation from another language — grammatically fine, but not what English actually says.

A quick self-edit pass

You do not need to fix all seven patterns at once. Run a draft through them in order, one pass each. Hunt collocations first, then nominalizations, then filler. After a few weeks the moves become automatic and you catch them while drafting instead of after.

A readability tool speeds this up by surfacing the sentences that are too long or too dense to scan — the exact places where stacked modifiers and zombie nouns hide. Paste a paragraph into the free Readability Checker and it flags the heavy sentences for you, so you know where to apply the fixes above.

How Diglot helps

Diglot is built for the bilingual writing workflow, where most awkward phrasing originates: you think in one language, then carry the structure across to English. Instead of only catching grammar, it works on the layer above it — the collocations, verb choices, and sentence rhythm that make writing read as native.

• Smooth the phrasing, not just the grammar. The Diglot paraphrasing tool rewrites clunky, translated-feeling sentences into natural English while keeping your meaning intact.
• Fix collocations in context. The assistant suggests the verb-noun pairings native speakers actually use, so "do a mistake" becomes "make a mistake" without you having to memorize every combination.
• Cut the wordiness. It flags nominalizations, filler, and weak verb chains, then offers the tighter version — so you learn the pattern, not just accept the edit.
• Keep your voice. The goal is your idea in fluent English, not a flat formal register that replaces how you actually write.

Correct grammar got you this far. Natural phrasing is the next step — and it is a learnable set of patterns, not a mystery. Fix the collocation, cut the nominalization, choose the strong verb, and your English stops sounding translated and starts sounding like you.

Try the paraphrasing tool