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Hi, I'm Joanne from Academic Skills.
This video is going to answer four frequently asked questions about academic style
and give you some tips to help you make university expectations in your writing.
The first point to remember, is that your writing needs to be clear.
Academic writing deals with complex ideas.
So it is important to keep your writing style simple and direct.
However, you do also need to be precise, formal and objective.
And this video will include examples of how to do that.
The first frequently asked question is.
Which words should I avoid?
Pause the video and take a moment to brainstorm any words you think you should not use in
academic writing.
Your list might include words like, good, big, thing, or get.
These words can be used in many different contexts.
If you look them up in a dictionary, you will see they have many possible meanings.
Try to replace them with words that express what you mean more precisely.
For example, quality, substantial, idea, obtain.
Your list might include contractions like can't or don't, which are used in speech
and less formal styles of writing.
To make your writing more formal.
Use the full words, such as cannot and do not.
You might have been told not to start sentences with words like and, but and so.
Although people often do this in less formal types of writing.
Try to use more formal connecting words such as, in addition, however,
and therefore at the beginning of sentences in academic writing.
If you are not sure if you can use a word, or if you are not sure what to replace, an
informal word with.
Pay close attention to the words that are used in the academic texts you are reading in
your subjects.
The next big question is how do I avoid I?
In academic writing, your ideas should be supported with evidence and logical reasoning.
Personal pronouns like I are associated with personal opinions and beliefs,
so they are often avoided in academic writing.
Unless the genre or task
specifically requires you to talk about your own actions or experience.
Reflective writing, for example, requires you to do this.
However, most academic writing does not use first person.
To avoid I, in the example,
I will examine the evidence.
You can substitute it with something else, such as this report.
Or you can write it in passive voice, as the evidence will be examined.
That brings me to the next question.
Should I stop using passive voice?
The passive voice is a grammatical structure that is formed using the verb be
and the past participle of the main verb.
It is contrasted with the active voice.
For example,
the researcher collected water samples at 10 a.m.
is an active voice
and
water samples were collected at 10 a.m.
is in passive voice.
Passive voice rearranges the sentence and shifts the focus to what was done.
The collection of water samples,
rather than who did it.
The researcher.
For this reason,
passive voice is often used to describe processes when the person or thing doing
each step is not particularly important or is obvious.
However, because the passive voice can hide who did an action,
it can be used to obscure responsibility.
Which is why you might see advice to use active voice.
In this sentence with two instances of passive voice.
Over 80 million gallons of oil were spilled on the coast because the legal requirement to
create a prevention contingency plan was ignored.
The emphasis is placed on the action of the spill and the lack of a plan.
Instead of who spilled the oil and who failed to create a plan.
The sentence using active voice makes us more aware of the offshore oil facility
and its operators who were responsible.
The offshore oil facility spilt over 80 million gallons of oil on the coast
because the operators ignored the legal requirement to create a prevention contingency
plan.
Passive voice can also make your meaning unclear.
In this example of active voice, I know that the researcher Garcia analyzed survey responses.
Garcia, 2015,
analyzed the responses from 20 surveys and found that.
But in the passive voice example,
the responses from 20 surveys were analyzed
and it was found, that Garcia 2015.
I'm not entirely sure whether Garcia analyzed the surveys or if this author
analyzed Garcia's surveys themselves.
The use of passive voice to hide responsibility
and the potential for passive voice to make your writing unclear
is why you might see advice suggesting writers
avoid passive voice.
However, remember that the passive voice is not a problem
if you are using it to put the focus on an action,
rather than the person or thing doing the action,
where that is appropriate.
Our fourth question is.
What is hedging and how do I do it?
Hedging language is used to avoid general and absolute statements that can easily
be disproven or might not apply 100 percent of the time.
For example, the statement
students who read for pleasure produce high quality writing,
could be questioned in many ways.
There is a range of language we can use to create a statement that is more difficult to dismiss,
such as,
students who frequently read books for pleasure are exposed to a greater amount of vocabulary
and a wide range of grammatical structures,
which may help improve their ability to communicate ideas in their own writing.
This sentence uses an adverb,
quantifiers and a modal verb, to create a more cautious statement.
Depending on your context,
it may be enough to hedge
by adding
tend to.
Students who read for pleasure
tend to produce
higher quality writing.
This is a decision you need to make based on your evaluation of the ideas
and how confident you are about them.
However, it is also possible to hedge too much.
If a thesis statement reads like this.
This essay attempts to discuss and examine the implications of these actions
and present solutions that may mitigate problems that arise.
It almost sounds like the author is not sure what they have written.
It would be better to be a little more confident.
Perhaps stating this essay discusses and examines the implications of these
actions and presents solutions designed to mitigate problems that arise.
Avoiding imprecise and informal words,
avoiding first person,
choosing between active and passive voice
and hedging
are just four aspects of academic style.
Another crucial element of academic style is being able to go beyond describing
the ideas of other authors
to providing a critique or interpretation of their ideas within your own work.
This aspect is so important,
that we deal with it separately in our Academic Skills resources on critical literacy.
For more tips and resources, search for academic skills, Unimelb.
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