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Academic Writing Style

The document discusses academic writing style and provides tips for editing and proofreading writing. It recommends aiming for clear, concise text by avoiding sentence fragments, balancing sentence length, choosing conjunctions carefully, replacing wordy expressions, and focusing on the topic rather than clever writing tricks.

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Ha Dang
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28 views5 pages

Academic Writing Style

The document discusses academic writing style and provides tips for editing and proofreading writing. It recommends aiming for clear, concise text by avoiding sentence fragments, balancing sentence length, choosing conjunctions carefully, replacing wordy expressions, and focusing on the topic rather than clever writing tricks.

Uploaded by

Ha Dang
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Hi and welcome back.

 
I'm Cecilia and in this video I'm going to talk about academic writing style and 
what we need to think of when we edit and proofread. 
The goal should be a text that's clear, concise, and easy to follow, and 
we want the reader's attention to be on the topic rather than on something else. 
In other word, we want to right elegantly but, in a way that doesn't direct 
the readers attention away from the topic and argument.

Play video starting at ::29 and follow transcript0:29


When we edit and proofread for language, one of the first things we often do 
is to check how the sentences we've written look. 
We want them to be grammatically correct, of course, but 
we also want them to look a certain way. 
For example, we want them to be complete sentences 
in the sense that they have both a subject and a predicate. 
The subject tells us who the agent or actor is, in other words, 
who does something or causes something to happen. 
Where the predicate tells us what happened.
Play video starting at :1:2 and follow transcript1:02
Elements that lack either a subject or a predicate are called "sentence fragments". 
And whereas sentence fragments are very common in spoken language, 
they shouldn't be used in academic writing because they make 
the text sound very spoken language like and unfocused.
Play video starting at :1:21 and follow transcript1:21

Sentence fragments can be quite tricky, because they can contain full 
clauses inside of them as modifiers, and that can fool us 
into thinking that the whole fragment is a complete sentence, which it isn't. 
Many beginning writers also worry about the length of their sentences. 
There's really no simple solution here. 

Your sentences should be long enough so the text does not look choppy but 
they shouldn't be too long because then your reader will get lost. 
A good rule of thumb is to aim at one main clause and 
one or two sub-clauses in the same sentence. 
And to vary the length of sentences a bit as that will make the text easier to read. 
We also need to check how we combine clauses to form sentences. 
And make sure that we choose the right conjunctions. 
Conjunctions are small linking words like and, or, but, if, because, and so on.
Play video starting at :2:18 and follow transcript2:18
It's important to use the right conjunction because we don't want to end 
up implying, for example, a cause and effect relation if there isn't one.
Play video starting at :2:28 and follow transcript2:28
We should also make sure that we vary the conjunctions we use. 
A number of clauses that are joined with one and the same conjunction, 
for example "and", sound very spoken-language-like, and they may actually give 
the text a bit childish flavor which we, of course, don't want. 
A sentence like, "I went home and ate and then the telephone rang and 
it was my grandmother and she wanted to know how I was doing", 
is much better if we divide it and get rid of most of the conjunctions. 
"I went home and ate. 
Then the telephone rang. 
It was my grandmother, who wanted to know how I was doing."
Play video starting at :3:9 and follow transcript3:09
Editing and proofreading a text for style also means that we need to check for 
places where we may have used unnecessarily complex or 
wordy expressions and replace them with more precise alternatives. 
There are expressions that may sound grand and 
we may think they make our text more elegant and somehow more academic, 
but the truth is, that they often make the text just more difficult to read.
Play video starting at :3:35 and follow transcript3:35
As many of these expressions are always so 
vague in meaning, they contribute very little to what we're trying to say.
Examples of complex and wordy expressions that we need to watch out for 
include nominalisations. 
Now, these are words where a verb has been turned into a noun 
with a help of an ending of some kind. 
Because every sentence that needs a verb will then need to come up with 
another verb and usually some articles, some prepositions as well to make out for 
the verb that we lost by turning it into a noun.
Play video starting at :4:10 and follow transcript4:10

So, all of a sudden, 


we have four of five words instead of just the one that we started out with. 
Nominalizations have their uses but we should be careful and not overuse them. 
We should also avoid using them when there is a precise strong verb available 
that says the same thing.
Play video starting at :4:31 and follow transcript4:31
Other examples of wordy expressions include clichés and 
other fixed expressions like "the bottom line", "to make a long story short", 
"at the end of the day", "it all boils down to this", and so on. 
It's also a good idea to watch out for figurative or non-literal language 
in academic essays because it may complicate the text unnecessarily. 
Not all figurative expressions are easy to interpret and 
they may actually direct the reader's attention away from the topic.
Play video starting at :5:4 and follow transcript5:04
To sum up, the focus in academic writing should be on what we say and 
what evidence we present for our claim and not on how cleverly we say things or 
what linguistic tricks we use in our writing.

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