hello all, just looking for a bit of help with my masters dissertation

so I'm trying to say something along the lines of:
"Using the UNPD figures for urban population that were given for 5-year intervals, equal incremental increases were calculated to give annual estimates for total urban population"

I realise that sentence sounds rubbish, and I'm trying to reword it, but I'm really struggling to think what to put instead of "equal incremental increases". I'm sure there must be a better maths-y way of saying that. any ideas?

equal increments

numbers

UNDP figures for urban population were used to calculate equal incremental increases in order to give annual estimates for total urban population.

passive voice should be gotten rid of

Good news everyone! Use constant instead of equal?

In this context, "constant incremental increases" would cause the reader to think "continual" increases or "unending" increases rather than "equal" increases.

Yes well I uh...

this was my thinking.

Emon: I really feel like I need increase in there somewhere, although I realise that equal increments does obviously sound better!

incremental increases is redundantly redundant!

"Using the UNPD figures for urban population over 5-year intervals, [I/we] produced annual estimates for total urban population by calculating uniform incremental increases."

You avoid the passive voice, which might be viewed as a symptom of trying to pad out your sentences. Without better understanding of the context I can't really suggest a better way of doing the incremental increases stuff. Another thing I removed was 'that were given' because the fact that you have the data implies that it came from somewhere.

We were forced to write in the passive voice for our course. I hated it.

It's a stylistic choice, and some (admittedly archaic) institutions do still prefer the passive voice. It's seen as representative of objectivity, but I agree that it often clumsy and difficult to construct a readable sentence in the passive voice.

Of course, sometimes the passive voice is entirely appropriate - if you're describing the work of someone else, and the previous sentence has already used a third person personal pronoun.

I find academic papers that avoid the passive voice to be a lot easier to read, I hate it when the good information is tied up in word soup.

thanks for the advice guys. I think the passive voice thing is definitely an issue throughout my whole paper, but I really struggle not to fall back on using first person pronouns, which I think is frowned upon more (bearing in mind that I'm a student trying to impress my supervisor, not a researcher publishing new work)

I have a new question: is there some form of non-breaking space or similar that means the space doesn't count towards your word count? My supervisor has told me that I need to separate all my figures and units (including % and degrees, eesh!), so it's having a pretty big effect on my word count. Nbsp doesn't change it, is there another option?

oh, and I'm gonna go with uniform, much better word, thanks Detty!

use a dash and set the colour to white ^^

Aye. Verbiage is bad.

Incremental increases, I think as Steven said, implies that the increments are increasing. It describes an acceleration, but I don't think that was your intent.