Academic Style

When writing for academic purposes, it is important to know what is appropriate. Instead of being personal and witty, like for example in a blog, or fast-paced and to-the-point, like in a news article, you should strive to comply with these guidelines:


• Choose your words carefully. Try to be as precise as possible and preferably use nominalization rather than lengthy verb constructions, e.g. "Comprehension is aided by repetition” is more formal than "You can understand something better if it is repeated.” Also avoid using slang and abbreviations. Illustrate points you make with specific examples, rather than just writing generally about them.

• Be tentative. Do not hold things that you are not entirely sure of as facts. Instead use hedges like: this suggests, one could assume, it is probable etc. This shows an understanding for other alternative views on things, and gives you more credibility in those claims that you do state to be true.

• Do not make it too personal. Academic texts are usually very impersonal in terms of language and the writer’s usage of pronouns like, for example, “I” and “we” should be kept to a minimum. It goes without saying that claims and cases you make are made by you, unless of course; you are quoting somebody, or copying someone else’s ideas, in which case you should acknowledge this appropriately.


These following examples of formal and informal writing are from the same webpage (twitter.com) and effectively show differences in styles of writing.


“Full investment in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of company size. More than fifty thousand interesting applications are currently using our freely available, rate-limited platform offerings. With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, we’re pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible.”


This is clearly quite a formal text with, for example, the nominalization “rate-limited platform offerings” which is rather complicated. However, we in this text spot pronouns, abbreviations, as well as the vague expression “we’re pretty sure”, for some reason. This is an example of how this works well in this particular context. Companies often have this personal approach in, for example, presentations or in job advertisements. Being posted on Twitter.com, we can assume that the audience reading this text will be comparably young, and particularly used to reading lots of abbreviated words. Perhaps it would have seemed out of place to be much more formal than this here.


“Met one of my Twitter rockstars @shahkamesh while at shoot.. He says hi!!! Huge shoutout!!”


Here we have a post of someone using Twitter as her tool to communicate and express her feelings in a fast and effective way. She has left out words that are not really necessary for us in order to understand her message, e.g. “(I today) Met one of my Twitter rockstars”. Furthermore, she has made words like “rock star” and “shout out” into compounds and also uses incorrect punctuation. Even so, this post will be understood perfectly by her Twitter followers because this is a type of language which they are almost certainly very used to.


The day is now drawing to an end and it would seem appropriate to retire for the night at this suitable hour. This is will likely be the case for yours truly, after these ending notes have come to a conclusion. Tomorrow is aptly a Friday, so insufficient hours of sleep will very unlikely cause any troublesome inconveniencies. Perhaps, a tedious day of scrutinizing school books will even resolve into a quite pleasurable evening. One could assume that the later part of a Friday will entail a joyous activity of some sort.


It’s getting kinda late and I should really drag my ass to bed soon!! I just have to finish these sentences first.. THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY tomorrow!! That means no school, so it doesn’t really matter if ill be tired or not! And hey! Theres always coffee right?! I’ll probably just spend the whole day tomorrow studying but you never know! Maybe it wont be half bad and something fun will happen later on….


Goodnight and ta-ta my little English toffees!


//Jenny