1. Describe the five main features of academic writing as opposed to spoken
English.
Main features of academic writing: complex, formal, objective, explicit and hedged.
COMPLEXITY: Written language is grammatically more complex than spoken language. It has
more subordinate clauses, more that/to complement clauses and more passives than spoken
language.
Written texts are shorter and have longer, more complex words and phrases. They have more
nominalisations, more noun based phrases, and more lexical variation.
FORMALITY: Academic writing is relatively formal and you should avoid:
- Colloquial words and expression (a lot of, thing, stuff)
- Abbreviated forms (can’t, doesn’t)
- Two-words verbs (call off: cancel, get over: recover)
- Sub-headings, numbering and bullet-points in formal essays.
- Asking questions.
OBJECTIVITY: Writing language is in general objective rather than personal. The thoughts
and beliefs should be based on your lectures, reading, discussion and research and it is
important to make this clear.
EXPLICITNESS: Academic writing is explicit about the relationship in the text. It’s the
responsibility of the writer to make it clear to the reader how the various parts of the text are
relation. Using different signalling words: time/order, comparison, contrast, cause and effect,
examples, generalisation, stating the obvious, attitude, conclusion, explanation, addition,
condition, support, contradiction, emphasis.
HEDGING: It’s necessary to make decisions about your stance on a particular subject or the
strength of the claims you are making. Language used in hedging:
- introductory verbs (seem)
- certain lexical verbs (believe)
- certain modal verbs (will)
- adverbs of frequency (often)
- modal adverbs (certainly)
- modal adjectives (certain)
- modal nouns (possibility)
- that clauses (there is very hope that)
- to-clause + adjective (it is useful to study).
2. Reading skills for academic study.
Useful skills are:
SCANNING TO LOCATE SPECIFICALLY REQUIRED INFORMATION: Scanning is
directed and purposeful and should be extremely fast.
SURVEYING A TEXT: Whatever you need to read, it is useful to have a quick look at it all first
to get an idea of the layout of the text and what is included.
SKIMMING A TEXT: when you want to survey a text to get a general idea of what it is about.
Main ideas are found in the first sentences of each paragraph, and in the first and last paragraph.
It is also useful to pay attention to the organisation of the text.
