ES5000 Chap.1 Features of Academic English
Features of Academic English
Why the course starts with register
The opening handout makes a claim that sounds obvious and is easy to underestimate: academic English is a different variety from the English you speak, and something acceptable in conversation may be out of place in an essay, a research paper or a thesis.
For a graduate student the practical skill is to recognise an academic text when you see one and to produce one when you need to, and the course treats those as two sides of the same ability.
Four considerations behind every academic text
The handout names audience, purpose, organisation and style, and says the list is not complete.
The usual reader of graduate writing is a professor who knows the subject well, though thesis committees, fellow students and journal or conference reviewers also count. Purpose and organisation travel together: a book review summarises before it evaluates, while a report of original research usually moves from introduction through methodology and results to discussion.
Style comes last and is partly discipline-specific.
What academic style sounds like
The handout characterises the academic writer's stance with three contrasts, objective against subjective, intellectual against emotional and rational against contentious, and asks for a tone that is serious, impersonal and formal.
It then lists twelve language features that produce that effect, from precise and followable sentences to hedging and the placement of adverbs. Most are small substitutions: a verb for a wordy noun phrase, a full form for a contraction, a single verb for a phrasal one.
How the week practises it
The exercises move from recognition to production.
You identify the type of text behind short extracts and rate their formality, judge pairs of sentences as formal or informal, compare a paragraph written in both registers, and finally rewrite wordy sentences so that they say the same thing in fewer words.
The Week 2 class also introduces genre analysis and academic vocabulary, and includes a pre-course writing task, so register is the lens through which everything else in the course is read.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Academic English as a register distinct from speech
- 02
Audience: the expert reader and the other readers of graduate work
- 03
Purpose and organisation as conventions of a genre
- 04
Style: objective, intellectual, rational, serious, impersonal, formal
- 05
Twelve language features grouped by the job they do
- 06
Rewriting informal sentences and making wordy ones concise
Worked example · free
Diagnosing register in a single sentence
- 2Find the conversational words and the phrasal verbs.
- 2Find the contraction and the negative placed before the verb.
- 2Write a version that keeps the meaning in academic register.
Key terms
- Register
- The variety of language suited to a situation, audience and purpose, such as the formal register expected in a thesis.
- Genre
- A recognised type of text, such as a book review or a research report, with conventions of purpose and organisation.
- Hedging
- Softening a claim with modal verbs or cautious phrases so that it states no more than the evidence supports.
- Phrasal Verb
- A verb combined with a particle, such as make up, usually replaced in academic prose by a single verb such as constitute.
- Sub-technical Vocabulary
- Words common to academic writing across fields, such as analyse, estimate and define, rather than terms of one discipline.
- Mid-position Adverb
- An adverb placed inside the clause, typically before the main verb, as academic prose prefers over the start or end of the sentence.
Features of Academic English FAQ
What makes writing academic rather than just formal?
Formality is one ingredient. Academic writing is also shaped by its expert audience, by a purpose that fixes the genre and its order, and by a stance that is objective and rational. A formal letter of complaint is formal without being academic, because its purpose and reader are different.
Is it wrong to use I or we in academic writing?
Not always. The course handout prefers passive constructions in general, but it notes that we can be used to stress that the authors chose a method, and that an active sentence is better when the passive becomes clumsy. Check what published papers in your own field do.
Why should I avoid phrasal verbs such as find out or set up?
Phrasal verbs belong mainly to spoken and informal English, and a single verb is usually more precise. Determine, establish and constitute say exactly what find out, set up and make up leave loose, and they match the register an expert reader expects.
How much hedging is too much?
Hedge the claims your evidence cannot fully support, such as generalisations beyond your sample, and state plainly the ones it does support. Hedging every sentence makes a writer sound unsure of everything, which weakens the claims that deserve confidence.
Assessment move
Collect five sentences from published papers in your own field and mark which of the twelve features each one uses. Then take a paragraph you wrote recently and change only the features the published sentences show you are missing.
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