essay about the use of language in academic text

20 Academic Tone and Language

Academic language.

Academic language has certain characteristics regardless of the course you are writing for.

• It is formal (see tone ), yet not overly complicated. It is unlike standard conversational language and the hints and tips below will help to elevate your writing style.
• It should be factual and objective; free from personal opinions, bias and value judgments. On rare occasions you may be asked to state your own personal point of view on a particular concept or issue. You should only do so if it is explicitly prescribed. This is the only time first person pronouns (I, my, we, our – see Chapter 5) are permitted.
• Academic writing is always supported by evidence rather than personal opinion, therefore emotional (emotive) or exaggerated (hyperbolic) language are not used.
• Academic language is most often enquiring or analytical in nature, therefore you must be willing to review more than one perspective on a topic and use language that demonstrates the ability to compare and contrast ideas (see signposting below).
• Academic language should be explicit; clear and not vague. Signposting can be used to lead the reader through the text from one section to another or from one idea to the next (see below).
• Passive voice (see chapter 7) can be used to avoid the use of personal pronouns. For example, instead of writing “In this essay I will discuss…”, you can write “This essay will discuss…”

Signposting

Signposting is the use of words and phrases to guide the reader through your written work. There are two types – major and minor.

Major Signposting

Major signposting is used to signal the introduction of key sections or aspects of the work. These might include the aim, purpose, or structure.

In the introduction

• This essay will…
• The aim of this essay is to…
• The major issue being discussed is…
• This essay will define and describe…
• This essay will critically examine…
• This essay will first define…then discuss…before making recommendations for…
• This essay is organised in the following way;

In the conclusion

• To conclude,
• In conclusion,
• To summarise,
• It is evident that

Minor Signposting

Minor signposting are linking words and phrases that make connections for your reader and move them through the text.

• They may be as simple as: First, second, third, next, then, last, lastly, finally
• To offer a counterpoint: However, although, though, yet, alternatively, nevertheless
• To indicate an example: For example, notably, for instance, in this case

These are just a few examples of signposting. For further information and some very useful instances of signposting please follow the link to Queen’s University Belfast [1]

Filetoupload,597684,en.pdf (qub.ac.uk)

Academic Tone

Tone is the general character or attitude of a work and it is highly dependent on word choice and structure. It should match the intended purpose and audience of the text. As noted in the Academic Language section above, the tone should be formal, direct, consistent (polished and error-free), and objective. It should also be factual and not contain personal opinions.

What is the difference between tone and voice?

When learning academic writing skills you may hear “voice” referred to, especially in terms of source integration and maintaining your own “voice” when you write. Note this does not mean maintaining your own opinion. This is something entirely separate. Voice is the unique word choices of the author that reflect the viewpoint they are arguing. Your “voice” is about WHO the reader ‘hears’ when they read your text. Are they ‘hearing’ what you have to say on the topic? Are your claims direct and authoritative ? Or, is your “voice” being drowned out by overuse or overreliance on external sources? This is why it is so important to understand that academic sources should ONLY be used to support what you have to say – your “voice”, NOT opinion – rather than being overused to speak on your behalf. This comes with practise and increased confidence in your own writing and knowing that you have something worth saying. Therefore, do plenty of background reading and research so that you can write from a well-informed position.

Hints and Tips

• First person pronouns (e.g., I, my, me) and second person pronouns (e.g., you, your, yours) (see Chapter 5).
• Contractions: as part of everyday conversational English, contractions have no place in formal academic writing. For example didn’t (did not), can’t (cannot), won’t (will not), it’s (it is – not to be confused with the pronoun its), shouldn’t (should not), and many more. Use the full words.
• Poor connectives: “but”, in particular is a very poor connective. Instead, refer to the signposting examples of however, although, nevertheless, yet, though. Also the overuse of “and”; try alternatives, such as plus, in addition, along with, also, as well as, moreover, together with.
• Avoid colloquial language.
• Avoid hyperbole .
• Avoid emotive language. Even in a persuasive text, appeal to the readers’ minds, not feelings.
• Avoid being verbose .
• Avoid generalizing .
• Avoid statements such as “I think”, “I feel”, or “I believe”; they are clear indicators of personal opinion.
• Do not begin a sentence with “and”, “because”, or digits – e.g., 75% of participants… Always begin a sentence with a word – Seventy-five percent.
• Do not use digits 0-9 as digits; write the whole word – zero, one, two, three. Once you get to double digits you may use the number – 10, 11, 12. The only exception to this rule would be sharing data or statistics, however the previous rule still applies.
• Academic vocabulary (sometimes this is discipline specific, such as technical or medical terms).
• Use tentative or low modal language when something you are writing is not definite or final. For example, could, might, or may, instead of will, definitely, or must.
• Be succinct .
• Include variance of sentence structure (see Chapter 7).
• Use powerful reporting verbs (see Chapter 14).
• Use clever connectives and conjunctions (see Chapter 5).
• Ensure you have excellent spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
• Use accurate referencing, both in-text and the reference list (see Chapter 10).
• Ensure correct use of capital letters for the beginning of each new sentence and for all proper nouns .
• Lastly, use correct subject-verb agreement . For an excellent list of examples of subject-verb agreement, please refer to Purdue Online Writing Lab. [2]

Subject/Verb Agreement // Purdue Writing Lab

• Queen's University Belfast. (n.d.). Signposting. Learning Development Service. https://www.qub.ac.uk/graduate-school/Filestore/Filetoupload,597684,en.pdf#search=signposting ↵
• Purdue University. (2021). Making subjects and verbs argree. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/grammar/subject_verb_agreement.html ↵

able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable

researched, reliable, written by academics and published by reputable publishers; often, but not always peer reviewed

informal, ordinary, everyday or familiar conversation, rather than formal speech or writing

obvious and intentional exaggeration; extravagant statement or figure of speech not to be taken literally

characterized by or pertaining to emotions; used to produce an emotional response

characterized by the use of many or too many words; wordy

to infer a general principle from particular facts; e.g., my five year old loves chocolate ice cream, therefore all five year olds love chocolate ice cream

concise expressed in few words

a verb used to report or talk about the ideas of others

used to link words or phrases together See 'Language Basics'

refer to a single entity; names of people, places, and things (e.g., cities, monuments, icons, businesses)

refers to the relationship between the subject and the predicate (part of the sentence containing the verb) of the sentence. Subjects and verbs must always agree in two ways: tense and number.

Academic Writing Skills Copyright © 2021 by Patricia Williamson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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5 Mastering the use of academic language

The first step to effective academic writing is to understand why you are using academic language. Academic language is a tool to help your reader understand your ideas, believe they are credible, and easily share them with others.  This is true whether you are writing your first undergraduate term paper, master’s thesis, doctoral dissertation, or manuscript for journal publication.  This chapter is dedicated to helping you better understand the purpose of academic writing, and how you can use it to improve the quality of work.  The result will be a better grade, passing score on thesis defense, or acceptance of a paper to a journal.   Important to note is that solid academic alone will not be sufficient in achieving these ends.  However, poor use of academic language will prevent you from doing so.

Helping your Reader Understand your Ideas

Academic language emerged from scientific language. As science developed and the methodical exploration of the world expanded beyond the work of a handful, opportunities for confusion proliferated. How could an individual studying insects in Europe, for instance, determine if their observations concerned the same insect that was being studied by an individual in North America? The two scientists might be writing in different languages, using local names for the insects being observed, and analyzing the insects using different categories or frameworks for observing the insects’ various parts, systems, and environments. A common language was needed to facilitate the exchange of ideas and knowledge. What developed was a vocabulary of precision. A six-legged, pebble-sized creature was no longer an iridescent object of fascination, but Popillia japonica . Popillia japonica is a name built on standard conventions that allow it to communicate information about the creature’s source of energy, body structure and composition, mobility, method of reproduction, means of interacting with the physical world, and more. Popillia japonica may be confusing and meaningless to people who do not study insects, but to those who do, using the name is a signal that you are an insider who is credible, is immediately clarifying, and makes it easier for others to talk about and build on your work.

Establishing your Credibility

A primary goal of academic writing is to establish your credibility. It is important to remember that you are not inherently credible. Your reader does not care what you think, and to the contrary, has been trained as an academic to be skeptical of any assertion that you make. Like a complex equation whose output is incorrect if even one of its variables is erroneous, your academic writing will likely be considered “not credible” and ignored if you use the wrong arguments or words.

The Right Arguments

Point of View and Source of Authority . The language you use is a reliable clue to the types of arguments you are employing. Academic writing is always written in third-person because you – the author, need to position yourself as an objective reporter and observer. If you find yourself writing (or thinking) with the word “I,” you have slipped into a subjective account of your work. Consider the difference between how a typical undergraduate students might write about Elton Mayo, and how the same idea might be expressed in professional academic writing.

An undergraduate might write:

“I think something else that Elton Mayo noticed was that people don’t just care about money. People also want to belong to a group, and sometimes that feels even more important than money.”

An academic writer might write:

In the first example, the writer has positioned themselves as the source of authority. Everything that comes after “I think” will be interpreted as the author’s personal opinion. The reader’s opinion may be different, and if it is they may dismiss what the author is trying to say. In the second example, Mayo’s work is positioned as the source of authority. The use of academic writing has moved the argument beyond the realm of personal opinions. The reader may personally believe that money is the only thing that motivates people, but they cannot argue about what Mayo did or did not write.

In a similar way, an undergraduate might write:

Anyone can argue with your personal perspective or the validity of your experience. Academic writers solve this problem by using the writing and research of others to focus their audience on what previous research has established, and what it means.

Including Your Perspective . Research old and new should be the foundation of argument in academic writing, but there is still room for original thought. The key here is that your original thoughts should not serve as the justification for any argument that you make – they may be the conclusion. The basic format of an academic paper is a helpful guide to how your thought process should work:

Basic structure of an academic paper

• Introduction and literature review: Is the question you are exploring relevant and why is it relevant? What have others already learned about it, and where is there room for you to add something helpful?
• Methods: What established research tools did you use to explore the question?
• Results: What did you find?
• Discussion: What do your results mean? What should be studied next?

In sections one through four, the author’s unique thinking is on display in through the questions that are asked, how previous research is organized and interpreted, and in how research methods are selected and designed. The author is functioning in these sections as a confident but impersonal guide, helping the reader recognize a desirable destination and a trustworthy path to get there. Commentary and editorializing are saved for section four. The discussion section is the one place where it is appropriate for you to include your own perspective. Even here however, the opinions you offer should be grounded in what has been established and observed. You may speculate about what the results of the research mean, but this speculation must be rooted in the research – personal anecdotes, feelings and biases remain out of bounds and counterproductive.

Th e Right Words

Precision . In addition to the type of arguments you choose, the words you use (or do not use) will impact your credibility. Your word choices should be guided by your goals: help your reader understand your ideas, believe they are credible, and easily share them with others. As discussed above, the very nature of academic writing is built on the idea of precision. Popillia japonica is not just a name, but a name that tells the reader exactly which creature is being discussed and the basic biological characteristics of the species. Each field has its own lexicon of precision, and wielding it well enhances the clarity and credibility of your writing.

Precision goes beyond the vocabulary of your field. It is also a matter of choosing words that eliminate or reduce opportunity for confusion. Words related to time are easy places to confuse your reader. For example, an undergraduate might write:

“100 years ago” gives a sense of precision, but this precision is contextual; 100 years ago from when? Is it 100 years before the present, the time at which the reader is reading? Or is it 100 years prior to when the author was writing? If that is the intended meaning, was it 100 years prior to the initial draft, or 100 years prior to when the paper was published? Should the reader assume that “around” implies within a year or two of 100 years ago, or closer to a decade? All of these questions can be avoided by simply using the precise year when the studies took place.

Vague language sneaks into writing in other ways too. Adverbs indicating degree or frequency, and adjectives asserting a superlative signal a sentence that may require more precision. For example, an undergraduate might write:

The sentence is vague in multiple ways. “Most” could mean many things, “my generation” is meaningless without context, and “best” and “a good work life balance” are subjective phrases that need to be explained.   Who is “most people?”   Your mom, that girl behind the counter you like, your dog, world renowned scholars?

Instead, an academic writer might write instead:

This sentence defines who is being discussed, and specifies how many of them share a clearly explained attribute. It is also not asking the reader to accept the statement on the author’s authority, but points to research that establishes a valid basis for the claim.

Conciseness . Academic writing should be concise. It is not focused on reaching a word limit, but on communicating a worthwhile idea. Consider the examples below. A student writing a 10-page term paper about the significance of the Hawthorne Studies might write:

An academic writer referring to Elton Mayo’s work might write:

The writer in the first example is focused on word count. Their writing includes various biographical, speculative, and redundant statements that are superfluous to understanding the significance of the Hawthorne Studies. Entire sentences (i.e., “These changes were not necessarily what managers would have initially expected “) contribute nothing to the reader’s understanding of the concept. The academic writer in the second example is focused on the salient idea, and they have communicated it clearly in about one tenth of the space the first writer used.

Longer papers are not proof of better ideas. Unnecessary words and phrases distract your reader from what is most important. They can also open the door to criticism that undermines your credibility. A sentence claiming that Elton Mayo “famously applied his highly analytical mind and unconventional academic background to better understand problems in cultivating positive labor force morale” may seem like an innocuous yet intelligent statement, but readers could disagree that Mayo’s background was unconventional, or wonder how the writer knows that Mayo had a “highly analytical mind.” Doubts like these – which may not even be directly related to the core of your paper’s argument, risk distracting from and discrediting whatever may follow. In academic writing, less is more.

Similarly, if one word can convey the same meaning as five words, one word is the better choice. If a widely known word can convey the same meaning as an obscure word, the common word is the better choice. The exception would be if the obscure word is part of vocabulary of your discipline. In that case, the “insider” word Is what should be used.

Sophistication .  The English language contains more words than most other languages in the world.  The BBC estimates that there are 171,000 words in use, while another 47,000 are obsolete (think Chaucer, Beowolf, and Bill Shakespeare).  Writing well means commanding not just the day-to-day words, but a wider scope of more academic quality lexicon.  English is the language of science, medicine, business, and air traffic control around the world, as well as prominent academic journals in most fields.  Many educated individuals from other parts of the world learn English as a second language at a conversational level because of this usefulness.  However, academic writers must master the language at a more sophisticated level.   Doing so requires a more complex use of phrasing and wider scope of vocabulary.   Relevant here is the origin of this sophistication – French!

Many of the “sophisticated” synonyms for common English words comes from French.  For example, instead of “improve”, academic write might say “ameliorate.”   The French word for improve is, yes, “améliorer.”   Other phrases are taken directly from French and used in academic writing without translation such as fait accompli (a task already done), espirit de corps (organizational culture), raison d’etre (reason for existence).   The French language began a heavy influence on English when the Norman’s conquested England in 1066.  French became the language of elites in the English courts, government, and social elites for 200 years.  French nobility sat on the English crown during this time until the French lost Normandy in 1204.   Thereafter, English became the language of choice, but French already left an indelible influence on the use of English.  The French linguist Henriette Walter estimates that more than two-thirds of the English language can trace their origins to French, despite English’s roots as a Germanic language.  Other cultures have used French as a marker of sophistication.  If you read a Dostoevsky novel, you would see the Russian aristocracy speaking French.  French was the language of international politics in Europe in the 19th century, and Russian nobles needed a language the non-elites wouldn’t understand.  Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918, French became all but dead in Russian society.  Even today, French represents sophistication – think perfume ads, supermodels, fashion, and wine.   French remains as the backbone of modern academic English vernacular and serves as the basis for sophistication.   As an academic writer (student or scholar) you should learn to embrace this level of sophistication and integrate a wider vocabulary in your writing.   In the practical guidance section of this book, we provide examples of words you can replace in search of this sophistication.

The Right Frame

What to Build On . A challenge with any academic paper is where to begin. The relevant literature will be vast. Your first goal should be to identify work that is seminal. Seminal work is widely cited within your field, and is often used as frame or point of comparison to describe new research. As you read the literature of your discipline you will also begin to recognize enduring themes and current trending topics. Seminal work, enduring themes, and trending topics are all useful frames that you should seek to employ strategically. Building on and incorporating these things, even if your research topic is arcane, will make your work easier for others to find, easier for them to appreciate, and easier for them to connect to their own research and writing.

Worth a Thousand Words . Figures and conceptual frameworks can also make your ideas easier to share. From Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Porters Five Forces, communicating an idea with a combination of simple illustrations and sparse text is a hallmark of influential and enduring academic writing. Before you begin to write, carefully consider how you might employ a visual explanation as an anchor for your writing. If you do this well, you will have made great progress toward helping your reader understand your ideas, believe they are credible, and easily share them with others.

The Right Project

In spite of academic writing’s imperatives to be precise, concise, and impersonal, good academic writing will also feel human. This cannot be achieved by merely following the highest standards for research and writing, or even developing a deep knowledge of your field’s literature and practice. The ineffable quality of “humanness” happens when a writer is genuinely interested in their work. Put plainly, their passion shows and becomes contagious. In an ocean of academic writing, humanness matters (this is not to say that an academic’s passion for their project is a replacement for superior work – it is a necessary complement). It is difficult to persuade someone to care about a topic if we don’t care about it ourselves.

Writing the literature review Copyright © by Robert Lloyd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Academic Phrasebank

• GENERAL LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS
• Being cautious
• Being critical
• Classifying and listing
• Compare and contrast
• Defining terms
• Describing trends
• Describing quantities
• Explaining causality
• Giving examples
• Signalling transition
• Writing about the past

The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological ‘nuts and bolts’ of writing organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation (see the top menu ). Other phrases are listed under the more general communicative functions of academic writing (see the menu on the left). The resource should be particularly useful for writers who need to report their research work. The phrases, and the headings under which they are listed, can be used simply to assist you in thinking about the content and organisation of your own writing, or the phrases can be incorporated into your writing where this is appropriate. In most cases, a certain amount of creativity and adaptation will be necessary when a phrase is used. The items in the Academic Phrasebank are mostly content neutral and generic in nature; in using them, therefore, you are not stealing other people’s ideas and this does not constitute plagiarism. For some of the entries, specific content words have been included for illustrative purposes, and these should be substituted when the phrases are used. The resource was designed primarily for academic and scientific writers who are non-native speakers of English. However, native speaker writers may still find much of the material helpful. In fact, recent data suggest that the majority of users are native speakers of English. More about  Academic Phrasebank .

This site was created by  John Morley .  

Academic Phrasebank is the Intellectual Property of the University of Manchester.

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Table of Contents

Ai, ethics & human agency, collaboration, information literacy, writing process, academic writing – how to write for the academic community.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - University of South Florida

Academic writing refers to the writing style that researchers, educators, and students use in scholarly publications and school assignments. An academic writing style refers to the semantic and textual features that characterize academic writing and distinguish it from other discourses , such as professional writing , workplace writing , fiction , or creative nonfiction . Learn about the discourse conventions of the academic community so you can write with greater authority , clarity , and persuasiveness (and, in school settings, earn higher grades!).  

What is Academic Writing?

Academic writing refers to all of the texts produced by academic writers, including theoretical, empirical , or experience-based works. Examples:

• Students at the high school and undergraduate level write essays, book reviews, lab reports, reviews of literature, proposals–and more . These assignments often presume an audience of a teacher-as-examiner
• by proposing a new theory, method, application
• by presenting new empirical findings
• by offering new interpretations of existing evidence .

Different academic fields have distinct genres , writing styles and conventions because each academic field possesses its own set of rules and practices that govern how ideas are researched , structured , supported , and communicated . Thus, there is no one single style of academic writing. Rather, there are many different writing styles a writer might adopt , depending on their aims of discourse , media , writing tools, and rhetorical situation .

Related Concepts: Audience – Audience Awareness ; Discourse Community – Community of Practice ; Discourse Conventions ; Elements of Style ; Genre ; Professional Writing – Style Guide ; Persona ; Rhetorical Stance ; Tone ; Voice

Differences aside, there are a number of discourse conventions that academic writers share across disciplines. These conventions empower writers to establish authority and clarity in their prose –and to craft pieces that can be understood and appreciated by readers from various academic fields as well as the general public.

Features of Academic Discourse

• Academic writing tends to be  substantive  rather than superficial,  anecdotal ,  vague or underdeveloped.  For example, a paper on climate change would not just describe the observed changes in temperature, but might also delve into the scientific theories that explain these changes, the evidence supporting these theories, the potential impacts of climate change, and the debates within the scientific community
• Academic writing prioritizes evidence and logical reasoning over anecdotal observations , personal opinions, personal beliefs emotional appeals
• Members of the academic community expect authors to provide evidence for claims . When academics introduce evidence into their texts, they know their readers expect them to establish the currency, relevance ,  authority , accuracy , and purpose of any evidence they introduce
• Academic writers are careful to support their claims with evidence from credible sources, especially peer-reviewed , academic literature.
• Academics are sensitive to the ideologies and epistemologies that inform research methods.
• For example, when a psychology student studies the effects of mindfulness on anxiety disorders, they would need to understand that their research is based on the assumption that anxiety can be measured and quantified, and that it can be influenced by interventions like mindfulness training. They would also need to understand that their research is situated within a particular theoretical framework (e.g., cognitive-behavioral theory), which shapes how they conceptualize anxiety, mindfulness, and the relationship between them.
• Academic writing is expected to be objective and fair–and free of bias . This means presenting evidence in a balanced way, considering different perspectives , and not letting personal biases distort the analysis.
• It also involves recognizing the limitations of the research and being open to criticism and alternative interpretations .
• Academic writers are very careful to attribute the works of authors whom they’re quoting , paraphrasing , or summarizing . They understand information has value , and they’re careful to discern who the major thought leaders are on a particular topic . They understand they cannot simply copy and paste large sections of copyrighted material into their own work, even if they provide an attribution .
• Academic writers must also abide copyright laws , which protect the rights of authors and creators. This means, for example, that they cannot simply copy and paste large sections of copyrighted material into their own work, even if they provide a citation . Instead, they can use smaller excerpts under the principle of “fair use,” or they can seek permission from the copyright holder to use larger portions.

Organization

Academic writing is typically organized in a deductive way (as opposed to inductively ). Many genresof academic writing have a research abstract, a clear introduction , body, conclusions and recommendations.

Academic essays tend to have an introduction that introduces the topic, the exigency that informs this call to write. reviews pertinent research, and explains the problem — hypothesis, thesis, and rhetorical situation. the context and states the purpose of the writing (aka, the thesis! ), the body develops the arguments or presents the research, and the conclusion summarizes the main points and discusses the implications or applications of the research

Typically, the design of academic documents is plain vanilla, despite the visual turn in communication made possible by the ubiquity of design tools. Unlike professional writing, which tends to be incredibly visual, academic writing tends to be fairly traditional with its focus on alphabetical text as opposed to visual elements.

• Plain Design: Academic documents, such as research papers, theses, or scholarly articles, typically follow a minimalist design approach. They primarily consist of black text on a white background, with a standard, easy-to-read font. This “plain vanilla” design reflects the focus of academic writing on the content rather than the presentation. The aim is to communicate complex ideas clearly and without distraction.
• Limited Use of Visuals: Unlike in professional writing or journalism, visuals such as images, infographics, or videos are not commonly used in academic writing. When they are used, it’s usually to present data (in the form of graphs, charts, or tables) or to illustrate a point (with diagrams or figures). The visuals are typically grayscale and are intended to supplement the text rather than replace it.
• Structured Layout: Academic writing tends to follow a structured layout, with clearly marked sections and subsections. This helps to organize the content and guide the reader through the argument. However, aside from headings, there is usually little use of design elements such as color, bolding, or varied fonts to highlight different parts of the text.
• Lack of Interactive Features: With the transition to digital media, many types of writing have become more interactive, incorporating hyperlinks, multimedia, or interactive data visualizations. However, academic writing has been slower to adopt these features. While academic articles often include hyperlinks to references, they rarely include other interactive elements.

However, as digital media and visual communication become increasingly prevalent, we may see changes in the conventions of academic design.

• Academic writing tends to be formal in persona , tone , diction . Academic writers avoid contractions , slang, colloquial expressions, sexist use of pronouns . Because it is written for specialists, jargon is used, but not unnecessarily. However, the level of formality can vary depending on the discipline, the genre (e.g., a research paper vs. a blog post), and the intended audience . For instance, in sociology and communication, autoethnography is a common genre , which is a composite of autobiography , memoir, creative nonfiction, and ethnographic methods .
• In the last 20 years, there has been a significant move toward including the first person in academic writing. However, in general, the focus of discourse isn’t the writer. Thus, most academic writers use the first person sparingly–if at all.
• Academic writers use the citation styles required by their audiences .
• Specialized Vocabulary: Academics often use specialized vocabulary or jargon that is specific to their field. These terms can convey complex ideas in a compact form, contributing to the compressed nature of academic prose. However, they can also make the writing less accessible to non-specialists.
• Complex Sentence Structures: Academic writing often uses complex sentence structures, such as long sentences with multiple clauses, or sentences that incorporate lists or parenthetical information. These structures allow academic writers to express complex relationships and nuances of meaning, but they can also make the writing more challenging to read.
• Referential Density: Academic writing often refers to other works, theories, or arguments, either explicitly (through citations) or implicitly. This referential density allows academic writers to build on existing knowledge and engage in scholarly conversation, but it also assumes that readers are familiar with the referenced works or ideas.

1. When is it appropriate to use the first person?

Use of the first person is now more commonplace across academic disciplines. In order to determine whether first person is appropriate, engage in rhetorical analysis of the rhetorical situation .

Recommended Resources

• Professional Writing Prose Style
• First-Person Point of View
• Using First Person in an Academic Essay: When is It Okay?
• A Synthesis of Professor Perspectives on Using First and Third Person in Academic Writing

Brevity - Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Coherence - How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Flow - How to Create Flow in Writing

Inclusivity - Inclusive Language

The Elements of Style - The DNA of Powerful Writing

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• USC Libraries
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Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper

• Academic Writing Style
• Purpose of Guide
• Design Flaws to Avoid
• Independent and Dependent Variables
• Glossary of Research Terms
• Reading Research Effectively
• Narrowing a Topic Idea
• Broadening a Topic Idea
• Extending the Timeliness of a Topic Idea
• Applying Critical Thinking
• Choosing a Title
• Making an Outline
• Paragraph Development
• Research Process Video Series
• Executive Summary
• The C.A.R.S. Model
• Background Information
• The Research Problem/Question
• Theoretical Framework
• Citation Tracking
• Content Alert Services
• Evaluating Sources
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources
• Tiertiary Sources
• Scholarly vs. Popular Publications
• Qualitative Methods
• Quantitative Methods
• Insiderness
• Using Non-Textual Elements
• Limitations of the Study
• Common Grammar Mistakes
• Writing Concisely
• Avoiding Plagiarism
• Footnotes or Endnotes?
• Further Readings
• Generative AI and Writing
• USC Libraries Tutorials and Other Guides
• Bibliography

Academic writing refers to a style of expression that researchers use to define the intellectual boundaries of their disciplines and specific areas of expertise. Characteristics of academic writing include a formal tone, use of the third-person rather than first-person perspective (usually), a clear focus on the research problem under investigation, and precise word choice. Like specialist languages adopted in other professions, such as, law or medicine, academic writing is designed to convey agreed meaning about complex ideas or concepts within a community of scholarly experts and practitioners.

Academic Writing. Writing Center. Colorado Technical College; Hartley, James. Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Guide . New York: Routledge, 2008; Ezza, El-Sadig Y. and Touria Drid. T eaching Academic Writing as a Discipline-Specific Skill in Higher Education . Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2020.

Importance of Good Academic Writing

The accepted form of academic writing in the social sciences can vary considerable depending on the methodological framework and the intended audience. However, most college-level research papers require careful attention to the following stylistic elements:

I.  The Big Picture Unlike creative or journalistic writing, the overall structure of academic writing is formal and logical. It must be cohesive and possess a logically organized flow of ideas; this means that the various parts are connected to form a unified whole. There should be narrative links between sentences and paragraphs so that the reader is able to follow your argument. The introduction should include a description of how the rest of the paper is organized and all sources are properly cited throughout the paper.

II.  Tone The overall tone refers to the attitude conveyed in a piece of writing. Throughout your paper, it is important that you present the arguments of others fairly and with an appropriate narrative tone. When presenting a position or argument that you disagree with, describe this argument accurately and without loaded or biased language. In academic writing, the author is expected to investigate the research problem from an authoritative point of view. You should, therefore, state the strengths of your arguments confidently, using language that is neutral, not confrontational or dismissive.

III.  Diction Diction refers to the choice of words you use. Awareness of the words you use is important because words that have almost the same denotation [dictionary definition] can have very different connotations [implied meanings]. This is particularly true in academic writing because words and terminology can evolve a nuanced meaning that describes a particular idea, concept, or phenomenon derived from the epistemological culture of that discipline [e.g., the concept of rational choice in political science]. Therefore, use concrete words [not general] that convey a specific meaning. If this cannot be done without confusing the reader, then you need to explain what you mean within the context of how that word or phrase is used within a discipline.

IV.  Language The investigation of research problems in the social sciences is often complex and multi- dimensional . Therefore, it is important that you use unambiguous language. Well-structured paragraphs and clear topic sentences enable a reader to follow your line of thinking without difficulty. Your language should be concise, formal, and express precisely what you want it to mean. Do not use vague expressions that are not specific or precise enough for the reader to derive exact meaning ["they," "we," "people," "the organization," etc.], abbreviations like 'i.e.'  ["in other words"], 'e.g.' ["for example"], or 'a.k.a.' ["also known as"], and the use of unspecific determinate words ["super," "very," "incredible," "huge," etc.].

V.  Punctuation Scholars rely on precise words and language to establish the narrative tone of their work and, therefore, punctuation marks are used very deliberately. For example, exclamation points are rarely used to express a heightened tone because it can come across as unsophisticated or over-excited. Dashes should be limited to the insertion of an explanatory comment in a sentence, while hyphens should be limited to connecting prefixes to words [e.g., multi-disciplinary] or when forming compound phrases [e.g., commander-in-chief]. Finally, understand that semi-colons represent a pause that is longer than a comma, but shorter than a period in a sentence. In general, there are four grammatical uses of semi-colons: when a second clause expands or explains the first clause; to describe a sequence of actions or different aspects of the same topic; placed before clauses which begin with "nevertheless", "therefore", "even so," and "for instance”; and, to mark off a series of phrases or clauses which contain commas. If you are not confident about when to use semi-colons [and most of the time, they are not required for proper punctuation], rewrite using shorter sentences or revise the paragraph.

VI.  Academic Conventions Among the most important rules and principles of academic engagement of a writing is citing sources in the body of your paper and providing a list of references as either footnotes or endnotes. The academic convention of citing sources facilitates processes of intellectual discovery, critical thinking, and applying a deliberate method of navigating through the scholarly landscape by tracking how cited works are propagated by scholars over time . Aside from citing sources, other academic conventions to follow include the appropriate use of headings and subheadings, properly spelling out acronyms when first used in the text, avoiding slang or colloquial language, avoiding emotive language or unsupported declarative statements, avoiding contractions [e.g., isn't], and using first person and second person pronouns only when necessary.

VII.  Evidence-Based Reasoning Assignments often ask you to express your own point of view about the research problem. However, what is valued in academic writing is that statements are based on evidence-based reasoning. This refers to possessing a clear understanding of the pertinent body of knowledge and academic debates that exist within, and often external to, your discipline concerning the topic. You need to support your arguments with evidence from scholarly [i.e., academic or peer-reviewed] sources. It should be an objective stance presented as a logical argument; the quality of the evidence you cite will determine the strength of your argument. The objective is to convince the reader of the validity of your thoughts through a well-documented, coherent, and logically structured piece of writing. This is particularly important when proposing solutions to problems or delineating recommended courses of action.

VIII.  Thesis-Driven Academic writing is “thesis-driven,” meaning that the starting point is a particular perspective, idea, or position applied to the chosen topic of investigation, such as, establishing, proving, or disproving solutions to the questions applied to investigating the research problem. Note that a problem statement without the research questions does not qualify as academic writing because simply identifying the research problem does not establish for the reader how you will contribute to solving the problem, what aspects you believe are most critical, or suggest a method for gathering information or data to better understand the problem.

IX.  Complexity and Higher-Order Thinking Academic writing addresses complex issues that require higher-order thinking skills applied to understanding the research problem [e.g., critical, reflective, logical, and creative thinking as opposed to, for example, descriptive or prescriptive thinking]. Higher-order thinking skills include cognitive processes that are used to comprehend, solve problems, and express concepts or that describe abstract ideas that cannot be easily acted out, pointed to, or shown with images. Think of your writing this way: One of the most important attributes of a good teacher is the ability to explain complexity in a way that is understandable and relatable to the topic being presented during class. This is also one of the main functions of academic writing--examining and explaining the significance of complex ideas as clearly as possible.  As a writer, you must adopt the role of a good teacher by summarizing complex information into a well-organized synthesis of ideas, concepts, and recommendations that contribute to a better understanding of the research problem.

Academic Writing. Writing Center. Colorado Technical College; Hartley, James. Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Guide . New York: Routledge, 2008; Murray, Rowena  and Sarah Moore. The Handbook of Academic Writing: A Fresh Approach . New York: Open University Press, 2006; Johnson, Roy. Improve Your Writing Skills . Manchester, UK: Clifton Press, 1995; Nygaard, Lynn P. Writing for Scholars: A Practical Guide to Making Sense and Being Heard . Second edition. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2015; Silvia, Paul J. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007; Style, Diction, Tone, and Voice. Writing Center, Wheaton College; Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Strategies for...

Understanding Academic Writing and Its Jargon

The very definition of research jargon is language specific to a particular community of practitioner-researchers . Therefore, in modern university life, jargon represents the specific language and meaning assigned to words and phrases specific to a discipline or area of study. For example, the idea of being rational may hold the same general meaning in both political science and psychology, but its application to understanding and explaining phenomena within the research domain of a each discipline may have subtle differences based upon how scholars in that discipline apply the concept to the theories and practice of their work.

Given this, it is important that specialist terminology [i.e., jargon] must be used accurately and applied under the appropriate conditions . Subject-specific dictionaries are the best places to confirm the meaning of terms within the context of a specific discipline. These can be found by either searching in the USC Libraries catalog by entering the disciplinary and the word dictionary [e.g., sociology and dictionary] or using a database such as Credo Reference [a curated collection of subject encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, guides from highly regarded publishers] . It is appropriate for you to use specialist language within your field of study, but you should avoid using such language when writing for non-academic or general audiences.

Problems with Opaque Writing

A common criticism of scholars is that they can utilize needlessly complex syntax or overly expansive vocabulary that is impenetrable or not well-defined. When writing, avoid problems associated with opaque writing by keeping in mind the following:

1.   Excessive use of specialized terminology . Yes, it is appropriate for you to use specialist language and a formal style of expression in academic writing, but it does not mean using "big words" just for the sake of doing so. Overuse of complex or obscure words or writing complicated sentence constructions gives readers the impression that your paper is more about style than substance; it leads the reader to question if you really know what you are talking about. Focus on creating clear, concise, and elegant prose that minimizes reliance on specialized terminology.

2.   Inappropriate use of specialized terminology . Because you are dealing with concepts, research, and data within your discipline, you need to use the technical language appropriate to that area of study. However, nothing will undermine the validity of your study quicker than the inappropriate application of a term or concept. Avoid using terms whose meaning you are unsure of--do not just guess or assume! Consult the meaning of terms in specialized, discipline-specific dictionaries by searching the USC Libraries catalog or the Credo Reference database [see above].

Additional Problems to Avoid

In addition to understanding the use of specialized language, there are other aspects of academic writing in the social sciences that you should be aware of. These problems include:

• Personal nouns . Excessive use of personal nouns [e.g., I, me, you, us] may lead the reader to believe the study was overly subjective. These words can be interpreted as being used only to avoid presenting empirical evidence about the research problem. Limit the use of personal nouns to descriptions of things you actually did [e.g., "I interviewed ten teachers about classroom management techniques..."]. Note that personal nouns are generally found in the discussion section of a paper because this is where you as the author/researcher interpret and describe your work.
• Directives . Avoid directives that demand the reader to "do this" or "do that." Directives should be framed as evidence-based recommendations or goals leading to specific outcomes. Note that an exception to this can be found in various forms of action research that involve evidence-based advocacy for social justice or transformative change. Within this area of the social sciences, authors may offer directives for action in a declarative tone of urgency.
• Informal, conversational tone using slang and idioms . Academic writing relies on excellent grammar and precise word structure. Your narrative should not include regional dialects or slang terms because they can be open to interpretation. Your writing should be direct and concise using standard English.
• Wordiness. Focus on being concise, straightforward, and developing a narrative that does not have confusing language . By doing so, you  help eliminate the possibility of the reader misinterpreting the design and purpose of your study.
• Vague expressions (e.g., "they," "we," "people," "the company," "that area," etc.). Being concise in your writing also includes avoiding vague references to persons, places, or things. While proofreading your paper, be sure to look for and edit any vague or imprecise statements that lack context or specificity.
• Numbered lists and bulleted items . The use of bulleted items or lists should be used only if the narrative dictates a need for clarity. For example, it is fine to state, "The four main problems with hedge funds are:" and then list them as 1, 2, 3, 4. However, in academic writing, this must then be followed by detailed explanation and analysis of each item. Given this, the question you should ask yourself while proofreading is: why begin with a list in the first place rather than just starting with systematic analysis of each item arranged in separate paragraphs? Also, be careful using numbers because they can imply a ranked order of priority or importance. If none exists, use bullets and avoid checkmarks or other symbols.
• Descriptive writing . Describing a research problem is an important means of contextualizing a study. In fact, some description or background information may be needed because you can not assume the reader knows the key aspects of the topic. However, the content of your paper should focus on methodology, the analysis and interpretation of findings, and their implications as they apply to the research problem rather than background information and descriptions of tangential issues.
• Personal experience. Drawing upon personal experience [e.g., traveling abroad; caring for someone with Alzheimer's disease] can be an effective way of introducing the research problem or engaging your readers in understanding its significance. Use personal experience only as an example, though, because academic writing relies on evidence-based research. To do otherwise is simply story-telling.

NOTE:   Rules concerning excellent grammar and precise word structure do not apply when quoting someone.  A quote should be inserted in the text of your paper exactly as it was stated. If the quote is especially vague or hard to understand, consider paraphrasing it or using a different quote to convey the same meaning. Consider inserting the term "sic" in brackets after the quoted text to indicate that the quotation has been transcribed exactly as found in the original source, but the source had grammar, spelling, or other errors. The adverb sic informs the reader that the errors are not yours.

Academic Writing. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Academic Writing Style. First-Year Seminar Handbook. Mercer University; Bem, Daryl J. Writing the Empirical Journal Article. Cornell University; College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Murray, Rowena  and Sarah Moore. The Handbook of Academic Writing: A Fresh Approach . New York: Open University Press, 2006; Johnson, Eileen S. “Action Research.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education . Edited by George W. Noblit and Joseph R. Neikirk. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Oppenheimer, Daniel M. "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly." Applied Cognitive Psychology 20 (2006): 139-156; Ezza, El-Sadig Y. and Touria Drid. T eaching Academic Writing as a Discipline-Specific Skill in Higher Education . Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2020; Pernawan, Ari. Common Flaws in Students' Research Proposals. English Education Department. Yogyakarta State University; Style. College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Invention: Five Qualities of Good Writing. The Reading/Writing Center. Hunter College; Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; What Is an Academic Paper? Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College.

Structure and Writing Style

I. Improving Academic Writing

To improve your academic writing skills, you should focus your efforts on three key areas: 1.   Clear Writing . The act of thinking about precedes the process of writing about. Good writers spend sufficient time distilling information and reviewing major points from the literature they have reviewed before creating their work. Writing detailed outlines can help you clearly organize your thoughts. Effective academic writing begins with solid planning, so manage your time carefully. 2.  Excellent Grammar . Needless to say, English grammar can be difficult and complex; even the best scholars take many years before they have a command of the major points of good grammar. Take the time to learn the major and minor points of good grammar. Spend time practicing writing and seek detailed feedback from professors. Take advantage of the Writing Center on campus if you need help. Proper punctuation and good proofreading skills can significantly improve academic writing [see sub-tab for proofreading you paper ].

Refer to these three basic resources to help your grammar and writing skills:

• A good writing reference book, such as, Strunk and White’s book, The Elements of Style or the St. Martin's Handbook ;
• A college-level dictionary, such as, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary ;
• The latest edition of Roget's Thesaurus in Dictionary Form .

3.  Consistent Stylistic Approach . Whether your professor expresses a preference to use MLA, APA or the Chicago Manual of Style or not, choose one style manual and stick to it. Each of these style manuals provide rules on how to write out numbers, references, citations, footnotes, and lists. Consistent adherence to a style of writing helps with the narrative flow of your paper and improves its readability. Note that some disciplines require a particular style [e.g., education uses APA] so as you write more papers within your major, your familiarity with it will improve.

II. Evaluating Quality of Writing

A useful approach for evaluating the quality of your academic writing is to consider the following issues from the perspective of the reader. While proofreading your final draft, critically assess the following elements in your writing.

• It is shaped around one clear research problem, and it explains what that problem is from the outset.
• Your paper tells the reader why the problem is important and why people should know about it.
• You have accurately and thoroughly informed the reader what has already been published about this problem or others related to it and noted important gaps in the research.
• You have provided evidence to support your argument that the reader finds convincing.
• The paper includes a description of how and why particular evidence was collected and analyzed, and why specific theoretical arguments or concepts were used.
• The paper is made up of paragraphs, each containing only one controlling idea.
• You indicate how each section of the paper addresses the research problem.
• You have considered counter-arguments or counter-examples where they are relevant.
• Arguments, evidence, and their significance have been presented in the conclusion.
• Limitations of your research have been explained as evidence of the potential need for further study.
• The narrative flows in a clear, accurate, and well-organized way.

Boscoloa, Pietro, Barbara Arféb, and Mara Quarisaa. “Improving the Quality of Students' Academic Writing: An Intervention Study.” Studies in Higher Education 32 (August 2007): 419-438; Academic Writing. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Academic Writing Style. First-Year Seminar Handbook. Mercer University; Bem, Daryl J. Writing the Empirical Journal Article. Cornell University; Candlin, Christopher. Academic Writing Step-By-Step: A Research-based Approach . Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2016; College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Style . College Writing. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Invention: Five Qualities of Good Writing. The Reading/Writing Center. Hunter College; Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; What Is an Academic Paper? Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College.

Writing Tip

Considering the Passive Voice in Academic Writing

In the English language, we are able to construct sentences in the following way: 1.  "The policies of Congress caused the economic crisis." 2.  "The economic crisis was caused by the policies of Congress."

The decision about which sentence to use is governed by whether you want to focus on “Congress” and what they did, or on “the economic crisis” and what caused it. This choice in focus is achieved with the use of either the active or the passive voice. When you want your readers to focus on the "doer" of an action, you can make the "doer"' the subject of the sentence and use the active form of the verb. When you want readers to focus on the person, place, or thing affected by the action, or the action itself, you can make the effect or the action the subject of the sentence by using the passive form of the verb.

Often in academic writing, scholars don't want to focus on who is doing an action, but on who is receiving or experiencing the consequences of that action. The passive voice is useful in academic writing because it allows writers to highlight the most important participants or events within sentences by placing them at the beginning of the sentence.

Use the passive voice when:

• You want to focus on the person, place, or thing affected by the action, or the action itself;
• It is not important who or what did the action;
• You want to be impersonal or more formal.

Form the passive voice by:

• Turning the object of the active sentence into the subject of the passive sentence.
• Changing the verb to a passive form by adding the appropriate form of the verb "to be" and the past participle of the main verb.

NOTE: Consult with your professor about using the passive voice before submitting your research paper. Some strongly discourage its use!

Active and Passive Voice. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Diefenbach, Paul. Future of Digital Media Syllabus. Drexel University; Passive Voice. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina.  

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Evaluative language in undergraduate academic writing: expressions of attitude as sources of text effectiveness in English as a Foreign Language

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the use of attitudinal language stands as a potential source of effectiveness in undergraduate academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In order to achieve this purpose, interpersonal features of a corpus of essays written by Mexican undergraduate students of English Language and Literature were analyzed. The model of appraisal (Martin, James R. & Peter R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal systems in English . Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan) was used to trace and contrast attitude resources of affect, judgement and appreciation in academic essays in relation to the grades they were granted by university professors at different levels of instruction. The results of the study confirm a significant relation between the use of resources of attitude and the perceived (in)effectiveness of the analyzed texts, as well as factors which potentially determine the nature of such relation and pose relevant implications for academic writing instruction in EFL in the context of the analyzed corpus.

1 Introduction

Writing academically in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is widely recognized as central to undergraduate education due to its role as the main means of production and dissemination of knowledge in international contexts ( Nesi and Gardner 2012 ). Academic writing is also considered as an activity which involves complex sets of skills that even expert writers keep on improving after continued experience ( Chazal 2014 ). As part of such complexity, the appropriate expression of interpersonal meanings has been found to be one of the most challenging components when learning how to write academically ( Hood 2010 ), mainly because of the pedagogical challenges involved in an appropriate induction of learners into the linguistic conventions developed by specialized discourse communities to produce interpersonal meanings.

Different from skills and competencies related to the communication of factual information and conventional paradigms of textual organization, construing interpersonal meanings involves the use of linguistic resources to express interaction among speakers, as well as the communication of the feelings and points of view they intend to share ( Moss 2011 ). Interpersonal meanings also convey social roles and evaluations ( Hyland 2005 ), as well as the speakers’ expression of a subjective reality, which conveys social relations, personal values, and different kinds of opinions they want to share with other speakers ( Perales et al. 2012 ). Additionally, the expression of interpersonal meanings relates to authorial presence, also known as stance, in academic texts; “how writers present themselves and express their own views and judgements” in relation to others ( Candarli et al. 2015 : 193). Because of their discourse semantic nature, the workings of these dynamics and their rhetorical effects might make it harder for learners of EFL academic writing to acquire, observe, and evaluate than grammatical and organizational features, as attested by observations like Lancaster’s (2014) , who has referred to interpersonal dynamics as recurring patterns of language use that are difficult to notice from casual scanning.

As explained by Ken Hyland, research has shown that fundamental challenges in teaching and learning interpersonal conventions in writing are found in two main sources of difficulties. For one thing, despite its actual social nature, academic writing may still be regarded as objective, rational and impersonal, which results in a neglection of the fact that academic, disciplinary practices involve variations in systems “of appropriate social engagement with one’s material and one’s colleagues” ( Hyland 2004 : 11). Additionally, cultural factors that shape students’ expectations, strategies, beliefs and, in general, schemas of knowledge and the whole process of learning also present learners with important challenges; besides the acquisition of grammatical structures, lexical resources, and notions of textual organization, learners writing in EFL have to deal with differences between diverse cultural conceptualizations of knowledge construction and communication. While certain cultures tend to favor “an analytical, questioning, and evaluative stance to knowledge”, others “have a very different perspective that favors conserving and reproducing existing knowledge” ( Hyland 2003 : 38).

Hyland’s considerations coincide with Chitez and Kruse’s (2012) observations about what they call writing cultures , which result from the fact that “each educational system creates its unique mixture of educational genres, writing/learning practices, assessment procedures, instructional materials, expectations towards writing, and required writing competencies, in varied relationships with the genres and practices of professional or scientific domains” (p. 153). An imminent consequence of this is that communities of learners and individual writers carry particular writing dynamics acquired from their various experiences, many of which differ significantly from each other. Thus, students learning how to write in EFL face the challenge to adjust – to lesser or greater degrees – to generalized conventions according to which they are expected to demonstrate their knowledge by voicing their judgements and putting their opinions forward in certain ways. Adjusting appropriately to such conventions may result in effective writing, which has been defined by Vega (2015) as the instantiation of argumentation which appropriately accommodates to the audience’s framework of attitudes and beliefs, gaining force in its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals.

Based on the consideration that the expression of interpersonal meanings plays an important role in the production of successful written academic texts and, as a result, may represent a significant source of (in)effectiveness in academic writing, several works have analyzed the use of interpersonal resources by undergraduate students in EFL in diverse international contexts. Some of such works have explored this dimension of academic writing from the perspective of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model ( Candarli et al. 2015 ; Crosthwaite and Jiang 2017 ; Lee and Deakin 2016 ), while others have adopted the systemic-functional perspective of the appraisal model ( Martin and White 2005 ) as their theoretical and methodological basis ( Derewianka 2007 ; Lee 2008 , 2015 ; Mei 2006 , 2007 ; Ryshina-Pankova 2014 ).

Despite the abundant production of research this subject has seen around the globe, the exploration of the relationship between interpersonal resources and effectiveness in academic EFL writing has not received much attention in Mexico and Latin America, where most related research has focused on academic writing in Spanish L1 ( Castro 2013 ; Castro and Sánchez 2013 ; González 2011 ; Ignatieva 2021 ; Navarro 2014 ; Valerdi 2021 ; Zamudio 2016 ). It is also worth noticing that, as it will be shown in further sections of this paper, most previous works beyond Latin American contexts have explored the interpersonal discourse of EFL writers from disciplines which require effective communication in English, but not the professional mastery or depth that is expected from future professionals of the English Language and Literature at different levels of linguistic and disciplinary instruction. Such potential mastery and depth in knowledge represent the need to analyze the workings of interpersonal language considering as many realizational variables as possible. Stemming from this, the objective of this paper is to use qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the use of interpersonal resources in a corpus of academic essays written in EFL by Mexican undergraduate students of English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico. This exploration is developed within the framework of Martin and White’s (2005) model of appraisal with specific focus on the system of attitude and the instantiation variables of attitudinal category, realization, explicitness, trigger, and authorship. In this work, I compare the features of attitudinal realizations in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays in order to understand the relationship between the use of attitudinal language and the perceived effectiveness of the essays where it is instantiated. Additionally, the features of the evaluative language in the corpus are observed in relation to the instructional and linguistic experience of the undergraduate authors of the texts, which were classified as basic, intermediate, and advanced.

In the following section, a brief account of the system of attitude is presented with particular focus on the categories that have been analyzed in this research. This is followed by an account of previous works that have explored the relationship between attitudinal language and the (in)effectiveness of academic writing by undergraduate EFL learners from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Then, a description of the mixed methodological approach which was applied in this research is presented. Finally, I report the most significant findings of this work in order to discuss their implications to teaching academic writing in EFL in the Mexican context.

2 The appraisal model and the system of attitude

Martin and White (2005) developed the appraisal model as an extension of the analysis of the interpersonal metafunction proposed in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1985 , 2004 . While Halliday describes this metafunction at the lexicogrammar stratum in terms of the clause as an exchange through the system of mood , the appraisal model approaches the expression of feelings, points of view and social relations at the stratum of discourse semantics through the systems of attitude , engagement , and graduation . The first one involves the discursive negotiation of emotion-related meanings (feelings, moral/ethical judgements, and aesthetic responses), while the second one relates to the speaker’s positioning in relation to other voices. The system of graduation has to do with the resources deployed to intensify and attenuate realizations of attitude and engagement ( Martin and White 2005 ).

This paper is concerned with the system of attitude , which encompasses the linguistic expression of emotions and their institutionalization as opinions related to the notions of ethics and aesthetics. The ultimate objective of using these resources is to share subjective points of view for the audience to consider them and, if the discourse is successful, adhere to them. In this sense, the expression of attitude is central for speakers’ argumentation of their positions and the representations of the world they communicate since “it is possible to adhere oneself not only to a thesis, but also to ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling” ( Amossy 2009 : 67–68). Thus, considering Vega’s definition of effectiveness (2015) as argumentation which accommodates to the audience’s attitudes and beliefs in order to increase its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals, the rhetorical effects of communicating one’s propositions accompanied by attitudinal evaluations may have the potential to enhance the effectiveness of the produced text beyond the scope of its objective contents.

In the model of appraisal , expressions of attitude are analyzed in terms of three sub-systems: affect , judgement , and appreciation . Affect relates to the linguistic realization of feelings, considered as the most basic forms of personal reaction in human linguistic development ( Martin 2000 ; Painter 2003 ; Torr 1997 ). These expressions are usually classified into the categories of +/− happiness [“affairs of the heart” ( Martin and White 2005 : 49)], +/− security (related to ecosocial well-being and sensations of anxiety and confidence), +/− satisfaction (linked to the satisfaction of personal needs and goals) and +/− desire (involving the willingness or attraction towards entities and processes). Prototypically, instances of affect are lexically realized in the form of qualities (attributes and epithets), mental and behavioral processes, and modal adjuncts. Table 1 illustrates examples of affect analyzed in the corpus of this study. The two columns on the right present information about the variables of realization – the lexico-grammatical form – and category – attitudinal sub-type – of each example.

Instances of the four categories of affect .

All the examples presented on this and other tables and figures are instances of evaluative language analyzed in the corpus of this research, except for *, which has been adapted from Martin and White (2005 : 46).

Resources from the judgement and appreciation sub-systems are the result of the modelling and sophistication of affectivity according to social norms and aesthetic parameters produced by social conventions, hence their status as institutionalizations of affect . These institutionalizations represent moral/ethic judgements about people, their actions, and the consequences of their actions, as well as personal considerations about the aesthetic properties of things, processes, and people. Following Martin and White’s (2005) description, expressions of judgement are classified into the categories of +/− normality (how special or unique someone is), +/− capacity (how able a person is), +/− tenacity (how resolute someone is), +/− veracity (related to people’s honesty) and +/− propriety (linked to people’s integrity). Judgement is typically realized through qualities and modal adjuncts ( Table 2 ).

Instances of the five categories of judgement.

Expressions of appreciation encode aesthetic evaluations of speakers in terms of three categories: +/− reaction (emotional responses provoked by things and processes), +/− composition (perceptions of the balance, regularity, and order of things), and +/− valuation (opinions about the aesthetic and practical value of things). Prototypical realizations of appreciation take the form of qualities and circumstances ( Table 3 ).

Instances of the three categories of appreciation.

The examples of attitude presented up to this point correspond to inscribed realizations; expressions that encode attitude overtly or explicitly. Affect , judgement , and appreciation can also be indirectly invoked . The particularity of invoked realizations of attitude is that they demand a special effort from the audience or interlocutor to identify and process the type of evaluation the speaker is doing. Another peculiarity of this type of realization is that it involves the selection of resources pertaining to the ideational metafunction, which “gives structure to experience, and helps to determine our way of looking at things, so that it requires some intellectual effort to see them in any other way than that which our language suggests to us” ( Halliday 2002 : 175). Hence observations by Hood and Martin (2005) and Hood (2010) of processes and participants as efficient attitudinal invokers: ideational meanings are seldom neutral, and speakers choose non-inherently evaluative resources for their invoking potential.

attitude is prototypically invoked through lexical metaphors, processes, nominal participants, and nominalizations of processes and qualities. A notorious exception to these invoked realizations is the case of affect , which can be inscribed through mental and behavioral processes. Table 4 illustrates invoked realizations of attitude analyzed in the corpus of this work.

Invoked realizations of attitude.

An additional remark on attitudinal invocation relates to potential double coding ( Martin and White 2005 ) resulting from indirect realizations of attitude where a given evaluation from one category may be invoked by means of the inscription of another category as in (1) below. In this example, the author expresses a negative evaluation of a reviewer’s knowledge ( appreciation > −composition), which indirectly realizes a negative evaluation about his abilities as a literary analyst ( judgement > −capacity). The possibility of finding such types of invoked realizations in discourse represents the need to make methodological decisions regarding the labelling of attitudinal realizations in an analysis, as was the case in this work. Pertinent observations are made later in the Section 4 .

For the purposes of this research, additionally to the variables of realization, category and explicitness, the variable of trigger is particularly relevant. This variable indicates the stimulus that motivates an evaluation. For the nature of the essays studied in this work – i.e., essays on literary works from English Literature – triggers of attitude were related to characters, other components of the literary works commented by the authors of the corpus (atmosphere, style, plot, etc.), and entities external to the literary works about which they write in their essays (literary concepts, periods, genres, currents, other works, different authors, etc.). Table 5 illustrates instantiations of attitude with labels of their realization, category, explicitness, and trigger.

Instantiations of attitude with realization variables.

3 Research on attitudinal meanings in undergraduate EFL academic writing

The study of the linguistic expression of attitude and its relationship with successful EFL academic writing has received considerable attention in international contexts. Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) analyzed a corpus of argumentative essays written by postgraduate Kurdish-speaking Iranian students of TEFL to explore whether appraisal resources can be used as a reference to evaluate argumentative writing in low- and high-graded essays. These authors found that higher proportions of attitude were characteristic of more successful texts, although both groups of texts were similar in a tendency to use more judgement and appreciation than affect . Additionally, high-graded essays displayed significantly more invoked affect through nominalizations and more inscribed valuation than low-graded texts, which tended to inscribe affect through mental processes and to invoke valuation . In terms of judgement , the main contrast between both sub-corpora lied in the selection of sub-categories, with high-graded essays mainly displaying resources of capacity and low-graded texts mainly instantiating normality . Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) conclude that, although clear tendencies showed that more successful essays tend to display more attitude , punctual instantiations suggested that “in assessing the essays as high- or low-graded, more important than the number of appraisal markers exploited in essays was how these resources were employed” (p. 75). This conclusion coincides with observations by Hunston (2011) , Hunston and Su (2019) , and Valerdi (2021) , who have pointed at the centrality of lexico-grammatical patterns and the strategic use of evaluative language in argumentative structures over low or high proportions of appraisal resources in texts.

Reaching similar conclusions, Myskow and Ono (2018) studied how Japanese undergraduate students of Law and Political Science used resources of affect, judgement and appreciation as part of their arguments’ justifying evidence in a corpus of 62 biographical essays. Having rated the texts as either high or low on the basis of a self-designed rubric, these authors found that both low- and high-rated essays displayed similar proportions of general attitudinal appraisal , with judgement as the most prevalent type of evaluation. Here, the relevant contrasts took place in terms of the most frequently used sub-systems in each group of texts, with high-rated essays displaying higher proportions of appreciation and judgement , and low-rated texts displaying more resources of affect . Additionally, for these researchers, what students found challenging was not the selection of particular attitudinal categories, but finding appropriate grammatical constructions for them to support their arguments; they noticed students relied heavily on attributes to inscribe conclusive evaluations about people. Myskow and Ono (2018) suggest writing teachers should not encourage learners to adopt critical perspectives through heavily polarized inscriptions, but to integrate evaluations with evidence in support of their conclusions through particular grammatical constructions.

In a work that explores the relationship between undergraduate students’ lack of critical voice and limitations in the management of evaluative language, Lee (2015) compared high- and low-graded persuasive essays written by native (Australian) and non-native (South Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese) undergraduate EAP students to identify how evaluative language contributes to academic writing success. In that study, native and non-native writers deployed judgement and appreciation ten times more frequently than affect . When focusing on appreciation resources, the author found that valuation was predominantly more used over expressions of composition and reaction , which they interpretated as a subject-specific particularity. When contrasting low- and high-graded essays, Lee found that less successful texts displayed affect-related reaction twelve times more frequently than successful essays. Additionally, she found that high-graded essays by both native and non-native writers displayed similar tendencies, with frequent use of judgement -invoking valuations . In 2008, Lee had reported very similar tendencies in a study based on a remarkably similar corpus, with high-graded essays deploying significantly more varied attitudinal resources – mainly invoked evaluations of judgment  – and depersonalized attitude  – in the form of nominalizations – than low-graded texts. For  Lee (2015) , shaping an appropriate use of evaluative language is key in EAP instruction, where “students’ exposure to the appraisal system helps them to acquire the relevant English Language skills including grammar and vocabulary most effectively in a context-appropriate manner” (p. 73).

In a work which supports Lee’s (2015) position, Bahmani et al. (2021) propose the model of appraisal as a pedagogical tool to help EAP writers show their critical stance in their texts. To support their claim, the authors developed an experimental study at an Iranian university, comparing the writing successfulness of an experimental group of 30 postgraduate students of English Language Teaching to that of a control group with the same number of students. The experimental group received writing instruction with explicit explanations and analyses of attitude and graduation . On the basis of standardized pre-tests and post-tests applied to both groups, Bahmani et al. concluded that explicit instruction on the use of evaluative language enabled the experimental group to perform more successfully in contrast with the control group, which did not improve its performance significantly.

Besides research based on appraisal analysis, the role of attitudes in academic writing in EFL has seen remarkable contributions developed through applications of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model. Despite general differences between metadiscourse and appraisal , both models have been found to share remarkable similarities in their conceptualization of linguistic attitudes (Du et al. 2023) : linguistic resources that “indicate the writer’s affective […] attitude to propositions” via markers of surprise, agreement, frustration, importance, etc. ( Hyland 2005 : 53). In this paper, key metadiscourse works are worth mentioning for their special focus on contrasting less or more effective texts on the basis of their attitudinal features.

One of such works is that by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) , who support the idea that successful attitudinal conventions can stem from instruction in academic writing. They explored how explicit instruction on the use of attitudinal metadiscourse affects the development of stance features in essays and reports. The authors investigated the development of attitude markers and other metadiscoursal resources during one semester of EAP instruction to undergraduate students from various disciplines in Hong Kong. After analyzing written samples before, during, and after explicit instruction, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) found that undergraduate authors had reduced their use of attitudinal markers significantly in their texts. Additionally, when they graded the same written samples, they found that interpersonal features developed through instruction were more likely to have a positive impact on evaluators. For these authors, “the ability to express a relevant and plausible stance is a crucial indicator of writing quality and development” (p. 94). As challenging as this has been proved to be, such ability can be trained in undergraduate students, who enter university writing privileging their attitudes about their claims and their positions, but may be instructed to develop a new academic voice, “gaining control over the rhetorical and linguistic aspects of academic discourse via the use of a more careful, narrower, less polarising and less personal range of expressions with which to convey their attitudes on a given topic” (p. 102).

Lee and Deakin (2016) looked more closely at the role of attitudinal metadiscourse markers in the effectiveness of undergraduate writing in EFL by analyzing essays written by Chinese learners enrolled in their first or second writing course at a university in the United States. The essays had been rated through a standardized grading rubric either as low or high. Lee and Deakin (2016) found that authors of successful essays had a tendency to include significantly more attitudinal markers than less successful essays. Additionally, these authors observed that attitudinal resources in high-rated texts displayed more varied lexico-grammatical realizations. In these authors’ corpus, the expression of authorial stance through attitude seems to be an important factor of success. Nevertheless, compared to other types of stance markers – namely hedges, boosters, self-mention, and engagement markers –, they observe that attitudinal resources are among the least used expressions of interpersonal meanings in both low- and high-rated essays. These findings can be related to those by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) in that not only do linguistic realizations of attitude seem to be modulated by EFL writers when writing in English, but they also appear to stem from effective instruction that results in the acquisition of rhetorical conventions of academic EFL writing. Adhering to or neglecting such conventions affects the impression of (in)effectiveness of undergraduate academic texts.

These works have explored and confirmed, to varying degrees and from interrelated perspectives, the possibility to link the use of evaluative attitudinal language to effectiveness in academic EFL writing in different international contexts. The following section presents a description of the methodological approach that was applied in this research in order to explore such relationship in the Mexican context. This will be followed by a report of the results obtained.

4 Methodology

The purpose of this paper is to analyze realizations of attitude in undergraduate academic essays in EFL in order to determine if their attitudinal features represent a potential source of text (in)effectiveness beyond lexicogrammatical and structural considerations. This is done through a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, comparing the deployment of resources from the three attitude sub-systems in essays written by Mexican undergraduate students from different instructional levels of the major on English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico.

The major in English Language and Literature consists of eight consecutive semesters. Students entering the first semester must provide evidence of having completed three years of EFL instruction during their high school studies. Additionally, they must pass an exam that determines whether they possess competencies equivalent to band B2 from the Common European Framework. As part of their studies in the major, they study four 16-week language courses during the first four semesters (one course per semester). From the fifth to the eight semesters, their training in the language takes place through specialized content subjects that are taught in English. These subjects include advanced English Literature courses where essay writing is a regular instructional and evaluative practice.

4.1 The corpus

The corpus of this work includes 41 essays that were written as final assignments in 16-week English Literature courses by students from different instructional levels: it comprises 15 essays written by students from 1st through 3rd semester – labeled as ‘basic’–, 15 essays from 4th through 6th semester – classified as ‘intermediate’ –, and 11 essays from 7th through 8th semester – considered as ‘advanced’ –. The texts were written under the general instruction to analyze one of the literary works studied during one semester, identify its most remarkable literary features, and justify observations about the chosen work. Each essay was evaluated by the teacher of the English Literature course where it was collected and was granted a grade from 5 to 10. During the recollection of the corpus, teachers in charge of the courses reported to have evaluated the essays on the basis of appropriate analysis of literary concepts and features, as well as cohesion, coherence, and grammatical accuracy. No standardized or specially-designed rubric was used, so the results of evaluation resulted from the expert view of teachers according to the academic liberty policy of the university.

For the purposes of this study, the texts were further divided into three sub-categories according to the grade they were granted by course teachers: low-graded (essays with notes from 5 to 6), middle-graded (notes from 7 to 8), and high-graded (notes from 9 to 10). Table 6 illustrates the composition and distribution of the corpus.

Composition and distribution of the corpus and sub-corpora.

4.2 The analysis

All realizations of attitude in the corpus were recorded and analyzed taking into account the variables of category, realization, explicitness, and trigger. For the trigger variable, five subject-specific labels were established due to the nature of the analyzed discourse: Author 1 (A1) is marked when the writer evaluates him or herself; Author 2 (A2), when the writer evaluates the author of the literary work he or she discusses in the essay; Character (CH), when the evaluated entity is a character or narrator from the literary work discussed in the essay; Text (TXT), when the writer evaluates elements of the literary work he or she analyzes in the essay, such as atmosphere, style, plot, etc.; and Other (OTH), when the evaluated entity is external to the literary work under analysis, such as literary periods, genres, other works, different authors, etc. Additionally, the authorship of attitudinal evaluation was identified through the variable of appraiser ( Martin and White 2005 ). This variable distinguishes between authorial (the writer is the one who evaluates attitudinally) and non-authorial (the writer attributes an attitudinal evaluation to someone else) realizations of attitude .

Besides tracking attitude types in the corpus, the purpose of observing all these realizational variables was to avoid misleading recordings due to potential double coding – i.e., invoked realizations of one attitudinal category instantiated by inscribed realizations of a different one. Because a delicate analysis of this type of invoked attitude is beyond the scope and purpose of this work, when examples of this were identified in the corpus, the inscribed interpretations were considered for the analysis on the basis of prototypical realizations and variables described earlier in Section 2 .

Table 7 illustrates attitudinal instantiations from the corpus with the labels of all the variables observed, including an instance of invoked judgement which was recorded as inscribed appreciation (**). In this example, inscribed appreciation ( +valuation ) is used to evaluate human +veracity indirectly.

Instantiations of attitude with labels of five realizational variables.

All instances of attitude were recorded and quantified in dynamic tables. Proportions of expression of each type of attitude were calculated by dividing the number of occurrences of each attitudinal paradigm by the total number of clauses in each text and sub-corpus (# of attitude instantiations/# of clauses). When focus was on attitude sub-types and realizational variables, proportions were calculated by dividing the number of the corresponding attitudinal paradigm by the total number of attitude instantiations in each text and sub-corpus. As in previous work on appraisal ( Lee 2008 ; Mei 2007 ; Valerdi 2016 ), Chi-squared tests were performed in order to confirm the statistical significance of the findings. This type of test is used to “examine the distribution of data across the categories of our analysis” and “the extent to which the distribution of your observed data varies from the distribution that would be expected if the independent variable had no effect on the dependent variable” ( Levon 2010 : 78). The students’ instructional level (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and perceived effectiveness (low, middle, and high) are independent variables in this study while the expression of attitude and its variables are dependent variables.

In linguistic studies involving categorical dependent variables, chi-square tests with a resulting p value of <0.05 indicate there is a relationship between the variables ( Rasinger 2013 ). In other words, such tests “tell you that there is at least a 95 % chance that the independent variable does in fact have an effect on the dependent variable” ( Levon 2010 : 81). The following section presents the results of the study and indicate p values obtained by the chi-square tests.

5.1 Attitude in the general corpus and by instructional level

As a general feature, there is a significantly reduced proportion of evaluative language in the whole corpus, with only 18.02 % of the clauses expressing attitude. This is reflected in each of the instructional level sub-corpora: 19 % in basic essays, 16 % in intermediate essays, and 20 % in advanced essays. Additionally, these sub-corpora display appreciation as the most recurrent type of attitudinal positioning, while affect is the least frequent attitudinal paradigm in the corpus. The proportions of the different types of attitude are statistically significant in all the instructional levels of the texts ( Table 8 ).

Proportions of realization per attitude sub-system by instructional level.

a When a p value is too long to be contained in a single cell, Excel, the program used for quantitative explorations in this work, reports the result with the suffix ‘E’ followed by an entire number. Such coding means that, for an exact reading of the p value, the decimal point in the result must be moved as many places to the left as indicated by the number following ‘E’. In this case, the value of p is statistically significant, as the full result (0.0000000000000000108249) is meaningfully bellow conventional 0.05.

When considering the variable of explicitness, the corpus features a progressive reduction of evaluative inscription, which is predominant in basic essays and reduces by 21 % in advanced texts ( Table 9 ). The differences in explicitness among the sub-corpora are highly statistically significant.

Proportions of inscribed and invoked attitude by instructional level.

Further careful analysis of the explicitness variable reveals that evaluations of  affect and appreciation are mainly inscribed in the three groups of texts while resources of judgement tend to be invoked ( Table 10 ). This corresponds directly to the most representative lexical realizations of attitude in the corpus: attributes, epithets, and mental processes for affect; attributes and epithets for appreciation; and processes, nouns and nominalizations for judgement. The proportions of explicitness were found statistically significant for judgement and appreciation only.

Proportions of invocation and inscription of attitude types by instructional level. Predominant tendencies are highlighted.

Regarding the realizational variable of triggers, authors of intermediate and advanced essays have literary characters, literary features, and external entities related to the works they analyze in their essays as stimuli for evaluative expressions, in that order of saliency and in almost identical proportions. Writers of basic essays, on the other hand, focus primarily on the authors of the works they discuss when positioning themselves attitudinally, but coincide with their intermediate and advanced counterparts in focusing on literary features of their analyzed works secondly, and thirdly on external entities ( Table 11 ).

Triggers of attitudinal evaluations by instructional level. The three most representative types of triggers in each sub-corpus are highlighted.

5.2 Attitude by perceived effectiveness

The corpus displays meaningful contrasts in the evaluative features of the essays when their perceived effectiveness is taken into consideration. In Table 12 , we can see there is an increasing presence of attitudinal evaluation that progresses from low-graded to middle-graded essays in the basic and intermediate sub-corpora. Such progression, however, does not continue in essays from the advanced sub-corpus, where the distribution of attitudinal realizations contrasts with the other texts and was found to be not statistically significant.

Proportions of attitude in relation to grades granted by university teachers.

A ppreciation resources are the most recurrent attitude type in all low-, middle-, and high-graded essays, followed by judgement and, in much lower proportions, by affect . Additionally, as illustrated in Table 13 , proportions of judgement and affect are close in representativeness to each other in all groups of texts, which indicates an interesting regularity related to the degree of effectiveness attributed to the essays by university teachers.

Proportions of attitude types in relation to grades granted by university teachers.

The explicitness variable does not seem to affect the tendencies in the corpus when related to perceived effectiveness ( Table 14 ). Inscribed appreciation and invoked judgement are the most representative choices in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays. Realizations of affect are significantly inscribed with two exceptions to this tendency. First, intermediate middle-graded essays display invoked affect over inscribed realizations by a difference of 20 %. Secondly, advanced low-graded essays are radically different from middle- and high-graded texts from the same instructional level with 100 % of affective realizations being invoked. Despite the clarity of these tendencies, differences in explicitness were not found statistically significant in relation to perceived effectiveness.

Proportions of invocation and inscription of attitude types in relation to grades granted by university teachers. Predominant tendencies are highlighted.

Table 15 shows remarkable regularities in the types of triggers that undergraduate writers of two sub-corpora have in mind when expressing attitudinal evaluation of different types. In the intermediate and advanced sub-corpora, all low-, middle-, and high-graded essays display evaluative focus on characters, textual literary features, external elements, the authors of their analyzed works, and the very authors of the essays, in that order of predominance. Interestingly, essays from the basic instructional level differ in every single proportion of trigger choice from the others, with textual literary features as the main attitudinal trigger in all low-, middle, and high-graded essays. The second most representative triggers in low- and middle-graded essays are external elements and characters, respectively, while high-graded essays prioritize authors of their analyzed woks. Finally, low- and middle-graded texts coincide in privileging the attitudinal evaluation of the authors of the works they study in the third place. High-graded essays, on the other hand, prioritize their attitudinal stance regarding elements external to their analyzed literary works. These results were found to be highly statistically significant for the basic essays of the corpus, slightly non-significant for the intermediate texts, and markedly non-significant for advanced essays.

Triggers of attitudinal evaluation in all sub-corpora in relation to grades granted by university teachers. The three most representative types of triggers in each sub-corpus are highlighted.

6 Discussion

The results of this research show a meaningful relationship between the use of attitudinal evaluation in undergraduate academic EFL writing and the production of effective texts in the context of the analyzed corpus. In this section, this is shown by discussing the results from general to particular starting with a global scenario of the corpus, then looking at attitudinal features of the texts according to their instructional levels, and finally discussing attitude in relation to the essays’ perceived effectiveness. Following this order, it will be easier to relate the findings to attitudinal features in general undergraduate academic writing and then observe specific features where perceived effectiveness in the texts plays a distinctive role in the corpus of this work.

6.1 Attitude in the general corpus

The first relevant observation is the reduced presence of expressions of attitude in the global corpus, which is a general regularity that previous studies from various contexts have found as a significant feature of academic writing. The low occurrence of attitudinal evaluations in this sort of discourse can be understood in terms of argumentative pertinence. As Hunston states ( 1999 ), in academic discourse, only certain things get linguistically evaluated and they do it in specific ways when it is worth it. Additionally, looking back at Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) observations on the effects of subjective language in discourse, the appeal to the affective responses of an audience usually takes place at strategic points where an objective argumentation may lack the necessary persuasive potential. Thus, in discourses where objectivity is highly appreciated, attitudinal evaluations are used in limited proportions and forms, leading to a strategic management of evaluative resources.

Such strategic nature in the use of attitudinal evaluations has been previously explored in academic discourse in Spanish and in EFL academic writing. Valerdi (2021) found that attitude resources occurred in limited proportions due to their usefulness in certain specific types of argument components in postgraduate academic discourses in Spanish. The corpus of this study seems to conform to this strategic management of attitudinal expression. Within the area of EFL academic writing, Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) concluded that particular dynamics of attitudinal deployment in texts are more determinant than large global amounts of attitudinal language in texts. In line with this, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) concluded that effective writing displays limited and careful expression of attitudinal meanings. Considering these antecedents, the general features of evaluative expressions in the corpus of this work seem to respond to academic writing conventions that learners have associated to their use of their target language and, in turn, reflect a general tendency that has been identified as a feature of effective writing in academic contexts.

6.1.1 Attitude types

A second feature the corpus shares with general effective writing is the predominance of realizations of appreciation in more than 50 % of evaluative resources. Such predominance prevails when breaking the corpus into smaller sub-corpora of basic, intermediate and advanced instructional levels. This leaves little room for affective evaluations, which occur in no more than 9 % of attitudinal realizations in all sub-corpora. As mentioned before, only certain things are evaluated in academic texts, and they are in certain ways only. This is confirmed when comparing these findings with those of previous works on appraisal in different contexts. Zhang and Cheung (2018) , for instance, found appreciation as the most realized type of attitude in articles on Second Language Writing, which they see as the result of a strategic evaluation which focuses on the value of things in order to objectify observations that are subjective in nature. Lee (2015) observes similar tendencies in undergraduate essays and emphasizes the importance of evaluating things related to the subject matter in the production of academic texts. According to these interpretations, prioritizing the appraisal of discipline-related things is central in academic arguments, where evaluation tends to be more objective than it would were it based on observations about human behavior or emotional responses of writers.

6.1.2 Attitudinal explicitness

The inscription and invocation of attitudinal meanings display one more regularity of the corpus that remains constant in the basic, intermediate, and advanced sub-corpora. From a general perspective, attitudinal evaluations are predominantly inscribed, making their attitudinal stance accessible in terms of the effort their identification and interpretation demand from the reader ( Halliday 2002 ). Nonetheless, such inscribing tendency changes when looking at each attitudinal category; realizations of judgement tend to be invoked in more than 65 % of occurrences.

These features carry interesting implications in terms of the degrees of explicitness with which EFL academic undergraduate authors deploy their evaluations. First, the global tendency to inscribe evaluations coincides with Hood and Martin’s (2005) observation that academic writers do not usually invoke attitude when constructing arguments around their work. The features of the corpus of this work confirm the validity of that observation in EFL academic writing. Regarding the contrasting realizations of judgement , previous research has shown how evaluations focused on people and their behavior tend to be managed more carefully in academic contexts than those triggered by things, taking the form of invoked attitudinal resources ( Hood and Martin 2005 ; Valerdi 2016 ). Apparently, the authors of the corpus behave more freely or confidently when evaluating things related to the subject matter of their work and their own personal impressions through appreciation and affect than when dealing with human – or humanized – triggers, in which case they tend to proceed more cautiously. It seems plausible to say these features correspond to generally effective evaluative dynamics in academic writing. Even though proportional differences between inscribed and invoked affect are not statistically significant ( Table 10 ), the regularity of their plain contrast and the significance of differences in judgement and appreciation stand as a remarkable feature of the corpus.

6.1.3 Triggers of attitudinal evaluation

The tendencies of the most recurrent triggers of attitudinal evaluation in the corpus are another area of significant regularity across instructional levels. The vast majority of attitude realizations is triggered by elements inherently associated to the literary works the authors analyzed in their essays; in the overall corpus, the most recurrent triggers are literary characters, followed by textual features from the realm of literary studies, and entities and concepts external to literary works in second and third place, respectively. These results seem to be a direct consequence of the instructions authors were given to analyze a literary work by identifying its most remarkable features as instances of literary genres and to justify their observations. Here, the notion of justification is key; since the authors were expected to justify their observations about literary features, it would seem natural to expect arguments founded on argumentative conclusions and supporting ideas focused on such things as characters, textual features and the contexts around literary works. Such was the case of the corpus of academic essays analyzed by Myskow and Ono (2018) , who found that attitudinal resources were used as part of the two central components of arguments, namely conclusions and supporting ideas, connected to subject matter-related triggers. Taking into consideration Myskow and Ono’s experience, together with Valerdi (2016) findings on the realizations of attitudinal evaluations directly connected to specific argument components, the statistically significant features of the triggers variable in this corpus confirm the centrality of attitudinal evaluation on the elaboration of academic arguments.

6.2 Attitude by instructional level

The corpus displays significant variations if the results are seen from the perspective of the three levels of instruction of the authors of the texts. There is a clear tendency for uses of affect and appreciation to decrease progressively from basic through advanced essays, while realizations of judgement increase from 13 % to 40 % ( Table 8 ). This could be interpreted as the direct consequence of the authors’ choice to evaluate characters from the works they studied and, as a result, it further supports the strategic nature of evaluative choices in the corpus; if any type of attitude was to remain present at different instructional levels, it was the one triggered by human-like entities. Additionally, despite the general reduction of inscribed evaluations in all three sub-corpora ( Table 9 ), expressions of judgement developed on the opposite direction, reducing their invoked realizations significantly ( Table 10 ). These observations suggest interesting evaluative dynamics on the corpus; while there is a general caution on the part of authors to evaluate human and human-like entities in their texts, there also seems to be certain development of a notion of discursive authority ( Poynton 1985 , as cited in Valerdi 2016 ) allowing writers to express their stance regarding human triggers in more open terms through inscribed judgmental evaluations as they gain more linguistic and disciplinary experience.

The relationship between evaluative language and disciplinary experience can also be seen in the triggers on which authors focus their attitude realizations. Writers of basic essays contrast with writers of intermediate and advanced texts in their evaluative focus on authors of literary works as the third most relevant triggers ( Table 11 ). Clearly, the interpretation of writers of basic essays regarding what elements are central in literary analysis is particular. Considering previous observations about the relevance of prioritizing arguments around the value of things to objectify evaluations ( Zhang and Cheung 2018 ), it seems plausible to conclude that, in intermediate and advanced texts, the less central consideration of human elements different from literary characters is the result of the development of a more specialized selection of elements worthy of literary discussion. These findings further support what has been observed by Candarli et al. (2015) , Lee and Deakin (2016) and Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) ; attitudinal choices seem to be modulated by EFL writers when writing in English and, in parallel with this, they stem from disciplinary instruction which leads to the acquisition of academic EFL writing rhetorical conventions. On the grounds of these observations, it is clear how previously discussed general features of effective writing develop in the corpus as essays progress towards more experienced writing.

6.3 Attitude in relation to perceived effectiveness

The results of the analysis evidence a tendency in high-graded essays to display significantly greater proportions of attitude than texts graded as low and middle ( Table 12 ). The fact that the advanced sub-corpus displays an irregular distribution – with middle-graded essays presenting the most attitude  – could be explained by the acquisition of more regularly applied conventions by advanced writers resulting in closer proportions between these groups of texts. Further explorations of advanced essays in this and similar contexts are needed to confirm this. Still, even though the p value of 0.11234221 indicates results might be different for this sub-corpus if this research were replicated, in the actuality of these results low-graded essays display the least instances of attitudinal evaluation.

It is remarkable to notice the significant predominance of appreciation over judgement and affect stands when effectiveness is considered. This indicates the development of attitude -related interpersonal conventions along basic, intermediate, and advanced instructional levels has been shaped by pedagogical dynamics that favor the observed tendencies via both instruction and academic evaluation: what teachers disseminate and evaluate as effective motivates what learners use to shape their discourse in this type of writing as they move towards more specialized levels of literary analysis. It is worth remembering that, according to what they reported, teachers who assessed the essays did not consider attitudinal expressions in their evaluation criteria. Then, in line with Lee’s analysis (2008), we can conclude that teachers might have perceived the management of evaluative language, which directly relates to writers’ stance and voice, as part of the appropriate analysis of literary components and features they sought; attitude is central to effectiveness in the corpus of this work.

Similar findings in previous research indicate the latter interpretation may also apply to other contexts; Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) found successful EFL texts by Iranian writers displayed significantly more frequent instances of appreciation than judgement and affect , just as Myskow and Ono (2018) did in their essays by Japanese students. Moreover, similarly to this research, patterns of attitudinal inscription and invocation in the corpora analyzed by those authors can be significantly related to degrees of (in)effectiveness. In the corpus of this work, inscription of affect and appreciation contrasts with invocation of judgement in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays – save for minor variations in affect , the least representative category, in the basic and intermediate sub-corpora. Although these contrasts may require further exploration to confirm statistical significance, their plain tendencies and their consistency with the significant dynamics by instructional level confirm the role of attitudinal meanings in the shaping of undergraduate writers’ positioning and, most importantly, a positive relationship between realizations of attitude and the effectiveness of undergraduate EFL academic writing instantiated by the corpus.

Such relationship is further evidenced by the development of attitudinal triggers selection patterns. As it was previously described, in both intermediate and advanced essays, characters, textual features and external literary elements are the most representative triggers in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays. In the basic sub-corpus, however, the very authors of the essays figure as either the second (low- and middle-graded texts) or first (high-graded-texts) choices. The contrast this represents can be explained, once more, on the basis of instruction and academic evaluation; although attitudinal stance focused on the very authors of the essays conflicts with the general features of the corpus, the fact that the other two main trigger types in basic essays remain within what can be seen as disciplinarily central in the general scenario may have allowed for certain tolerance on the part of teachers. Although having access to feedback received by the writers of the basic essays would be the only way to confirm this, it should be enough to notice that trigger selection in relation to text effectiveness takes a clear orientation in the rest of the corpus, thus corroborating the role of attitudinal evaluations in undergraduate academic writing instantiated by the corpus.

In the light of these results, a positive relationship between the expression of attitudinal meanings and academic texts (in)effectiveness has been confirmed. What is more, the writing conventions followed by the authors of the corpus of this work suggest that attitudinal features privileged by university teachers in basic levels of instruction determine the conventions adopted in effective texts at more advanced levels, even when attitudinal dynamics do not seem to have been explicitly prioritized. Apparently, attitudinal dynamics in the context of the corpus have developed from complex influences which go beyond mere linguistic and disciplinary instruction. These observations relate to Chitez and Kruse’s (2012) considerations about writing cultures: further extra disciplinary features related to writing cultures shape what could be considered as effective or successful in writing academically. These include learners’ class experience before and during university education, contact with diverse curricular arrangements, university-specific organizational structures, national writing cultures, and differences among languages. As evidenced by the findings of this work, these factors represent important aspects to consider in the design of academic writing programs and discipline-specific writing courses as these may have to take into consideration the features of their participants’ target audiences, including potential expectations determined by their own linguistic, cultural, and even institutional backgrounds.

All these considerations have a particular centrality in programs focused on training future professionals in English Language and Literature for, as it has been shown, even when interpersonal dynamics involving attitude conform to similar general tendencies in the whole corpus of this study, they vary significantly at more delicate degrees of analysis such as instructional levels and realizational variables. Additionally, exploring such delicacy in variation, which can only be done by analyzing the academic discourse of speakers from different instructional levels within the same undergraduate community, may also serve as a valuable source of information for pedagogical actions aiming to guide undergraduate writers in the production of effective texts in other disciplines.

7 Conclusions

As the findings of this work have shown, the construction of interpersonal relationships through the use of linguistic resources of attitude plays an important role in the perceived effectiveness of undergraduate EFL academic writing at different levels of experience and disciplinary instruction, which indicates the importance of broadening assessment criteria of academic writing beyond the constraints of lexicogrammatical accuracy and text structure, as well as pertinent observations about attitudinal positioning in instructional processes, in favor of deeper interpersonal metalinguistic awareness in both students and writing instructors. In order to face these instructional challenges, it is important to emphasize the results also show that the influence of attitudinal language in the (in)effectiveness of academic texts is furtherly determined by a complex series of contextual factors including discursive authority, writing experience, discipline-specific focus objects, and the multi-faceted writing-related cultural background of writers.

These conclusions are supported by six main findings that have been reported in this paper: 1) In adherence to general academic writing, the corpus displays a significantly low occurrence of attitude resources, which results from a strategic deployment of interpersonal resources by writers as to what is evaluated in their texts and in what ways; 2) General attitudinal features in the corpus privilege appreciation as the most frequent type of attitude and position affect as the least deployed evaluative resource, which reflects the writers’ prioritizing of evaluations of discipline-related things to project an objective-like positioning; 3) Realizations of judgement throughout the corpus are mainly invoked, signaling the adoption of particular evaluation strategies around human or human-like triggers; 4) Basic essays feature greater use of attitudinal resources than intermediate and advanced essays, suggesting a progressive development of objective-like writing dynamics; 5) Overall, high-graded essays display more frequent expressions of attitude than middle- and low-graded essays, suggesting that the expression of attitude is not simply reduced in learners’ discourse as they move forward in their academic training, but according to conventions that favor certain types of strategic attitudinal positioning in texts; 6) In general, the realizational variables of attitude category, explicitness and trigger selection show significantly matching tendencies in high-graded essays in the basic, intermediate and advanced sub-corpora, confirming the central role of the strategic use of affect , judgement and appreciation resources in terms of their realizational variables in the production of effective texts, even when writing conventions develop towards reduced proportions of attitude . Those findings which were not found to be statistically significant might need further exploration, perhaps on the basis of a larger corpus, in order to refine their implications from a statistical perspective. Still, it is worth remembering statistical interpretations, either descriptive or inferential, always leave room for open possibilities.

Regarding the latter point, interpretations of the reported results need to take into consideration that a relevant limitation of this study is the size of its corpus. Although the results of the analysis demonstrate consistent and mostly statistically significant features, their full implications apply to the context of the academic community where the essays were collected. In order to obtain more generalizable findings with more predictive potential in relation to the Mexican context, future work might need to replicate the study on the basis of a larger and more varied corpus.

While the scope of the results of this work is limited to the boundaries of the context of this research, the implications of its findings represent meaningful contributions that complement previous research on the workings of appraisal resources of attitude in EFL academic writing. Most importantly, this work contributes to further understanding of the workings of evaluative language in academic instruction in the context of Mexico, where pedagogical developments from the systemic functional perspective of appraisal theory are still in their early stages. It is ideal that the focus of future work seek to implement research findings in the development of concrete instructional tools which improve the scenario of effective interpersonal positioning for undergraduate authors seeking to take part in international disciplinary dialogue through academic English.

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• Academic writing

Types of academic writing

• Planning your writing
• Structuring written work
• Grammar, spelling and vocabulary
• Editing and proofreading
• Evidence, plagiarism and referencing
• Resources and support

The four main types of academic writing are descriptive, analytical, persuasive and critical. Each of these types of writing has specific language features and purposes.

In many academic texts you will need to use more than one type. For example, in an empirical thesis:

• you will use critical writing in the literature review to show where there is a gap or opportunity in the existing research
• the methods section will be mostly descriptive to summarise the methods used to collect and analyse information
• the results section will be mostly descriptive and analytical as you report on the data you collected
• the discussion section is more analytical, as you relate your findings back to your research questions, and also persuasive, as you propose your interpretations of the findings.

Descriptive

The simplest type of academic writing is descriptive. Its purpose is to provide facts or information. An example would be a summary of an article or a report of the results of an experiment.

The kinds of instructions for a purely descriptive assignment include: 'identify', 'report', 'record', 'summarise' and 'define'.

It’s rare for a university-level text to be purely descriptive. Most academic writing is also analytical. Analytical writing includes descriptive writing, but also requires you to re-organise the facts and information you describe into categories, groups, parts, types or relationships.

Sometimes, these categories or relationships are already part of the discipline, while in other cases you will create them specifically for your text. If you’re comparing two theories, you might break your comparison into several parts, for example: how each theory deals with social context, how each theory deals with language learning, and how each theory can be used in practice.

The kinds of instructions for an analytical assignment include: 'analyse', 'compare', 'contrast', 'relate', and 'examine'.

To make your writing more analytical:

• spend plenty of time planning. Brainstorm the facts and ideas, and try different ways of grouping them, according to patterns, parts, similarities and differences. You could use colour-coding, flow charts, tree diagrams or tables.
• create a name for the relationships and categories you find. For example, advantages and disadvantages.
• build each section and paragraph around one of the analytical categories.
• make the structure of your paper clear to your reader, by using topic sentences and a clear introduction.

In most academic writing, you are required to go at least one step further than analytical writing, to persuasive writing. Persuasive writing has all the features of analytical writing (that is, information plus re-organising the information), with the addition of your own point of view. Most essays are persuasive, and there is a persuasive element in at least the discussion and conclusion of a research article.

Points of view in academic writing can include an argument, recommendation, interpretation of findings or evaluation of the work of others. In persuasive writing, each claim you make needs to be supported by some evidence, for example a reference to research findings or published sources.

The kinds of instructions for a persuasive assignment include: 'argue', 'evaluate', 'discuss', and 'take a position'.

To help reach your own point of view on the facts or ideas:

• read some other researchers' points of view on the topic. Who do you feel is the most convincing?
• look for patterns in the data or references. Where is the evidence strongest?
• list several different interpretations. What are the real-life implications of each one? Which ones are likely to be most useful or beneficial? Which ones have some problems?
• discuss the facts and ideas with someone else. Do you agree with their point of view?

To develop your argument:

• list the different reasons for your point of view
• think about the different types and sources of evidence which you can use to support your point of view
• consider different ways that your point of view is similar to, and different from, the points of view of other researchers
• look for various ways to break your point of view into parts. For example, cost effectiveness, environmental sustainability, scope of real-world application.

To present your argument, make sure:

• your text develops a coherent argument where all the individual claims work together to support your overall point of view
• your reasoning for each claim is clear to the reader
• your assumptions are valid
• you have evidence for every claim you make
• you use evidence that is convincing and directly relevant.

Critical writing is common for research, postgraduate and advanced undergraduate writing. It has all the features of persuasive writing, with the added feature of at least one other point of view. While persuasive writing requires you to have your own point of view on an issue or topic, critical writing requires you to consider at least two points of view, including your own.

For example, you may explain a researcher's interpretation or argument and then evaluate the merits of the argument, or give your own alternative interpretation.

Examples of critical writing assignments include a critique of a journal article, or a literature review that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of existing research. The kinds of instructions for critical writing include: 'critique', 'debate', 'disagree' and 'evaluate'.

You need to:

• accurately summarise all or part of the work. This could include identifying the main interpretations, assumptions or methodology.
• have an opinion about the work. Appropriate types of opinion could include pointing out some problems with it, proposing an alternative approach that would be better, and/or defending the work against the critiques of others.
• provide evidence for your point of view. Depending on the specific assignment and the discipline, different types of evidence may be appropriate, such as logical reasoning, reference to authoritative sources and/or research data.

Critical writing requires strong writing skills. You need to thoroughly understand the topic and the issues. You need to develop an essay structure and paragraph structure that allows you to analyse different interpretations and develop your own argument, supported by evidence.

This material was developed by the Learning Hub (Academic Language and Learning), which offers workshops, face-to-face consultations and resources to support your learning. Find out more about how they can help you develop your communication, research and study skills .

See our Writing skills handouts .

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• 40 Useful Words and Phrases for Top-Notch Essays

To be truly brilliant, an essay needs to utilise the right language. You could make a great point, but if it’s not intelligently articulated, you almost needn’t have bothered.

Developing the language skills to build an argument and to write persuasively is crucial if you’re to write outstanding essays every time. In this article, we’re going to equip you with the words and phrases you need to write a top-notch essay, along with examples of how to utilise them.

It’s by no means an exhaustive list, and there will often be other ways of using the words and phrases we describe that we won’t have room to include, but there should be more than enough below to help you make an instant improvement to your essay-writing skills.

If you’re interested in developing your language and persuasive skills, Oxford Royale offers summer courses at its Oxford Summer School , Cambridge Summer School , London Summer School , San Francisco Summer School and Yale Summer School . You can study courses to learn english , prepare for careers in law , medicine , business , engineering and leadership.

General explaining

Let’s start by looking at language for general explanations of complex points.

1. In order to

Usage: “In order to” can be used to introduce an explanation for the purpose of an argument. Example: “In order to understand X, we need first to understand Y.”

2. In other words

Usage: Use “in other words” when you want to express something in a different way (more simply), to make it easier to understand, or to emphasise or expand on a point. Example: “Frogs are amphibians. In other words, they live on the land and in the water.”

3. To put it another way

Usage: This phrase is another way of saying “in other words”, and can be used in particularly complex points, when you feel that an alternative way of wording a problem may help the reader achieve a better understanding of its significance. Example: “Plants rely on photosynthesis. To put it another way, they will die without the sun.”

4. That is to say

Usage: “That is” and “that is to say” can be used to add further detail to your explanation, or to be more precise. Example: “Whales are mammals. That is to say, they must breathe air.”

5. To that end

Usage: Use “to that end” or “to this end” in a similar way to “in order to” or “so”. Example: “Zoologists have long sought to understand how animals communicate with each other. To that end, a new study has been launched that looks at elephant sounds and their possible meanings.”

Adding additional information to support a point

Students often make the mistake of using synonyms of “and” each time they want to add further information in support of a point they’re making, or to build an argument . Here are some cleverer ways of doing this.

6. Moreover

Usage: Employ “moreover” at the start of a sentence to add extra information in support of a point you’re making. Example: “Moreover, the results of a recent piece of research provide compelling evidence in support of…”

7. Furthermore

Usage:This is also generally used at the start of a sentence, to add extra information. Example: “Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that…”

8. What’s more

Usage: This is used in the same way as “moreover” and “furthermore”. Example: “What’s more, this isn’t the only evidence that supports this hypothesis.”

9. Likewise

Usage: Use “likewise” when you want to talk about something that agrees with what you’ve just mentioned. Example: “Scholar A believes X. Likewise, Scholar B argues compellingly in favour of this point of view.”

10. Similarly

Usage: Use “similarly” in the same way as “likewise”. Example: “Audiences at the time reacted with shock to Beethoven’s new work, because it was very different to what they were used to. Similarly, we have a tendency to react with surprise to the unfamiliar.”

11. Another key thing to remember

Usage: Use the phrase “another key point to remember” or “another key fact to remember” to introduce additional facts without using the word “also”. Example: “As a Romantic, Blake was a proponent of a closer relationship between humans and nature. Another key point to remember is that Blake was writing during the Industrial Revolution, which had a major impact on the world around him.”

12. As well as

Usage: Use “as well as” instead of “also” or “and”. Example: “Scholar A argued that this was due to X, as well as Y.”

13. Not only… but also

Usage: This wording is used to add an extra piece of information, often something that’s in some way more surprising or unexpected than the first piece of information. Example: “Not only did Edmund Hillary have the honour of being the first to reach the summit of Everest, but he was also appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.”

14. Coupled with

Usage: Used when considering two or more arguments at a time. Example: “Coupled with the literary evidence, the statistics paint a compelling view of…”

15. Firstly, secondly, thirdly…

Usage: This can be used to structure an argument, presenting facts clearly one after the other. Example: “There are many points in support of this view. Firstly, X. Secondly, Y. And thirdly, Z.

16. Not to mention/to say nothing of

Usage: “Not to mention” and “to say nothing of” can be used to add extra information with a bit of emphasis. Example: “The war caused unprecedented suffering to millions of people, not to mention its impact on the country’s economy.”

Words and phrases for demonstrating contrast

When you’re developing an argument, you will often need to present contrasting or opposing opinions or evidence – “it could show this, but it could also show this”, or “X says this, but Y disagrees”. This section covers words you can use instead of the “but” in these examples, to make your writing sound more intelligent and interesting.

17. However

Usage: Use “however” to introduce a point that disagrees with what you’ve just said. Example: “Scholar A thinks this. However, Scholar B reached a different conclusion.”

18. On the other hand

Usage: Usage of this phrase includes introducing a contrasting interpretation of the same piece of evidence, a different piece of evidence that suggests something else, or an opposing opinion. Example: “The historical evidence appears to suggest a clear-cut situation. On the other hand, the archaeological evidence presents a somewhat less straightforward picture of what happened that day.”

19. Having said that

Usage: Used in a similar manner to “on the other hand” or “but”. Example: “The historians are unanimous in telling us X, an agreement that suggests that this version of events must be an accurate account. Having said that, the archaeology tells a different story.”

20. By contrast/in comparison

Usage: Use “by contrast” or “in comparison” when you’re comparing and contrasting pieces of evidence. Example: “Scholar A’s opinion, then, is based on insufficient evidence. By contrast, Scholar B’s opinion seems more plausible.”

21. Then again

Usage: Use this to cast doubt on an assertion. Example: “Writer A asserts that this was the reason for what happened. Then again, it’s possible that he was being paid to say this.”

22. That said

Usage: This is used in the same way as “then again”. Example: “The evidence ostensibly appears to point to this conclusion. That said, much of the evidence is unreliable at best.”

Usage: Use this when you want to introduce a contrasting idea. Example: “Much of scholarship has focused on this evidence. Yet not everyone agrees that this is the most important aspect of the situation.”

Adding a proviso or acknowledging reservations

Sometimes, you may need to acknowledge a shortfalling in a piece of evidence, or add a proviso. Here are some ways of doing so.

24. Despite this

Usage: Use “despite this” or “in spite of this” when you want to outline a point that stands regardless of a shortfalling in the evidence. Example: “The sample size was small, but the results were important despite this.”

25. With this in mind

Usage: Use this when you want your reader to consider a point in the knowledge of something else. Example: “We’ve seen that the methods used in the 19th century study did not always live up to the rigorous standards expected in scientific research today, which makes it difficult to draw definite conclusions. With this in mind, let’s look at a more recent study to see how the results compare.”

26. Provided that

Usage: This means “on condition that”. You can also say “providing that” or just “providing” to mean the same thing. Example: “We may use this as evidence to support our argument, provided that we bear in mind the limitations of the methods used to obtain it.”

27. In view of/in light of

Usage: These phrases are used when something has shed light on something else. Example: “In light of the evidence from the 2013 study, we have a better understanding of…”

28. Nonetheless

Usage: This is similar to “despite this”. Example: “The study had its limitations, but it was nonetheless groundbreaking for its day.”

29. Nevertheless

Usage: This is the same as “nonetheless”. Example: “The study was flawed, but it was important nevertheless.”

30. Notwithstanding

Usage: This is another way of saying “nonetheless”. Example: “Notwithstanding the limitations of the methodology used, it was an important study in the development of how we view the workings of the human mind.”

Giving examples

Good essays always back up points with examples, but it’s going to get boring if you use the expression “for example” every time. Here are a couple of other ways of saying the same thing.

31. For instance

Example: “Some birds migrate to avoid harsher winter climates. Swallows, for instance, leave the UK in early winter and fly south…”

32. To give an illustration

Example: “To give an illustration of what I mean, let’s look at the case of…”

Signifying importance

When you want to demonstrate that a point is particularly important, there are several ways of highlighting it as such.

33. Significantly

Usage: Used to introduce a point that is loaded with meaning that might not be immediately apparent. Example: “Significantly, Tacitus omits to tell us the kind of gossip prevalent in Suetonius’ accounts of the same period.”

34. Notably

Usage: This can be used to mean “significantly” (as above), and it can also be used interchangeably with “in particular” (the example below demonstrates the first of these ways of using it). Example: “Actual figures are notably absent from Scholar A’s analysis.”

35. Importantly

Usage: Use “importantly” interchangeably with “significantly”. Example: “Importantly, Scholar A was being employed by X when he wrote this work, and was presumably therefore under pressure to portray the situation more favourably than he perhaps might otherwise have done.”

Summarising

You’ve almost made it to the end of the essay, but your work isn’t over yet. You need to end by wrapping up everything you’ve talked about, showing that you’ve considered the arguments on both sides and reached the most likely conclusion. Here are some words and phrases to help you.

36. In conclusion

Usage: Typically used to introduce the concluding paragraph or sentence of an essay, summarising what you’ve discussed in a broad overview. Example: “In conclusion, the evidence points almost exclusively to Argument A.”

37. Above all

Usage: Used to signify what you believe to be the most significant point, and the main takeaway from the essay. Example: “Above all, it seems pertinent to remember that…”

38. Persuasive

Usage: This is a useful word to use when summarising which argument you find most convincing. Example: “Scholar A’s point – that Constanze Mozart was motivated by financial gain – seems to me to be the most persuasive argument for her actions following Mozart’s death.”

39. Compelling

Usage: Use in the same way as “persuasive” above. Example: “The most compelling argument is presented by Scholar A.”

40. All things considered

Usage: This means “taking everything into account”. Example: “All things considered, it seems reasonable to assume that…”

How many of these words and phrases will you get into your next essay? And are any of your favourite essay terms missing from our list? Let us know in the comments below, or get in touch here to find out more about courses that can help you with your essays.

At Oxford Royale Academy, we offer a number of  summer school courses for young people who are keen to improve their essay writing skills. Click here to apply for one of our courses today, including law , business , medicine  and engineering .

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Superscript or Subscript in Word [For Students]

Students from multiple disciplines need to write papers. Some of these disciplines might need you to write a chemistry lab report or a Mathematical theory paper. In situations like these, how do you type in compounds or powers like H2O or x2 without it looking like H2O or x2?

In Word, learning how to add superscripts and subscripts can elevate your formatting skills, but that’s something that a lot of students struggle with. How do you add a superscript and subscript in Word? Let me help you out. Follow this guide for complete step-by-step instructions using WPS Office.

How Students can use Superscript and Subscript for Paper

Superscripts and subscripts are used in a variety of texts. In many papers, using superscripts and subscripts are important to accurately represent the information you are writing about. It is critical for STEM majors and students who have to write academic papers.

Use Superscript and Subscript for Academic Writing

When writing academic papers, many students are confused on how to express information where superscripts and subscripts are involved. The main distinction between them is whether they appear at the base or at the top of the line you’re writing in. Let’s break these down with examples.

Oftentimes, when writing about chemical ionic compounds, mathematical sequences, or doing homework involving a computer programming language, there are text items that we need to express as subscripts. These might appear like this:

a1, b3, H2O

Superscripts are used in references or to indicate any degree or notation. These might appear like this:

C24, Robert3, Organograma

Use Superscript and Subscript for Citations

In academic writing, citations and references are the most important parts of your research and writing. Formatting for citations can be a bit tricky since it might involve footnotes or endnotes.

When inserting a citation, make sure to use a number as a superscript at the end of the citation. In your respective footnote, enter in the corresponding number and type in your complete citation.

To make it easier to understand, I’ll show you an example of what this looks like:

Practical Tips for Formatting

As students, you have to write academic papers very frequently. It is helpful to refer to citation style guides like APA, MLA, or Chicago to understand their usage of superscripts and subscripts.

For your ease, APA style recommends the use of superscripts within the text for citations, while subscripts for chemical arrangements and mathematical expressions. MLA and Chicago might differ slightly in this regard.

However, once you do refer to these style guides, your paper will be easy to read, and will be more consistent and professional in presentation.

Here's a breakdown of common scenarios where you might use superscript and subscript:

Superscript Formatting :

Ordinal Numerals: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.

Copyright and Trademark Symbols: ©, ™, ®

Footnote and Endnote Numbers: Numbers referring to additional information within a text.

Mathematical Functions (Exponents): x^2 (x squared), e^x (exponential function), etc.

Chemical Symbols (Ion Charges): Na⁺ (sodium ion with a positive charge)

Subscript Formatting :

Chemical Formulas (Number of Atoms) : H₂O (water, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom)

Mathematical Settings (Indices) : A_i (ith element in a matrix A)

Steps of Using Superscript and Subscript

In using superscripts and subscripts, there are two ways you can go about it. I’ll explain both in a simple way so you can easily follow along. To do that, I’ll be using WPS, a free office suite that is compatible with all versions of Word documents, and is available on Mobile, Windows, and Mac.

I prefer it because it's free and can even convert your papers to PDF without losing the format. It reduces the hassle of using other softwares, and acts as an all-in-one tool when working on your document. Let’s begin:

Step 1 : Type in your sentence or text as you normally would until you reach the point where you need to add a superscript/ subscript in Word .

Step 2 : Go to the Home tab.

Step 3 : In the “Font” section, you will see the options for superscript and subscript, marked by an “x” as a base and a corresponding number in superscript/subscript. Click on your desired option.

Visually, the option would look like this:

Step 4 : Start typing in your text that needs to be in superscript/subscript.

Step 5 : Click the option again to deselect the superscript/subscript and return to normal font size.

In these 5 easy steps, you have now typed your superscripts/subscripts.

You might have noticed that if your document needs a lot of citations, or deals primarily with subscripts and superscripts, this process can take up a lot of your time.

To make it a little quicker, consider simply selecting the text. Let me show you how to do that:

Step 1 : Select the text that you want to use as superscript/subscript.

Step 3 : In the “Font” section, click on the respective superscript/subscript option that you want.

Once you click somewhere else on the document, the option will automatically deselect so you can return to your normal font size.

I have found these steps very easy to follow when writing. However, if you’re really short in time, I’ll let you in on some keyboard shortcuts to use as well. All you have to do is select your text that you need as a superscript/subscript in Word and press your shortcut keys.

The keyboard shortcut for adding a superscript is:

Ctrl + Shift +  Plus Sign (+)

The keyboard shortcut for adding a subscript is:

Ctrl + Equal Sign (=)

How WPS Office Can Help Students Create Academic Documents

WPS Office has always been a favorite among students for its user-friendly interface and robust features. With the integration of WPS AI, it's become even more powerful. The AI feature significantly enhances the quality of your language, and ensures that your academic documents are polished and error-free with real-time grammar and spell-checks.

Additionally, WPS has a wide collection of ready-to-use, editable templates specifically designed for academic use. These templates provide a structured format for various academic documents, from research papers to reports and essays, allowing you to start writing with confidence.

Coupled with the templates, WPS’s seamless PDF conversion feature can convert your documents to PDF in just a click without losing formatting. This is especially useful when submitting assignments, sharing work with classmates, or sending documents to professors or supervisors.

FAQs about Superscript and Subscript in Word for Students

Q1. how do i ensure my superscript and subscript text remains aligned with the main text.

There's no way to directly adjust the default position of superscripts and subscripts in most text editors. However, you can use the Advanced tab of the Font dialogue to raise or lower selected text, which indirectly affects their alignment with the main text. This method allows you to manually adjust the vertical position of superscripts and subscripts. It is important to note that this technique applies to regular document text. If you're dealing with equations created by the built-in equation editor , these adjustments may not be applicable.

Q2. Can superscript and subscript formatting be applied in WPS Office mobile apps?

In WPS Office, you can format text as superscript or subscript in the desktop version and the mobile apps. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1 : Launch your WPS Office Writer document on your mobile device.

Step 2 : Select the text you want to format as superscript or subscript.

Step 3 : Click on the menu icon to access additional options.

Step 4 : Scroll down until you locate T2 and T2.

Step 5 : If you want to format your text as superscript, then choose T2 and if you want to format the text as subscript then select T2.

Q3. What distinguishes subscript from superscript?

Subscript is when text is lowered below the regular line, while superscript is when text is raised above the regular line.

Subscript is commonly used in :

Chemical formulas (e.g., H₂O).

Mathematical expressions (e.g., CO₂).

Footnotes or references in academic writing.

Superscript is often used for :

Exponents in mathematical equations (e.g., x²).

Footnote numbers in academic papers.

Indicating units (e.g., m² for square meters).

Mastering Superscripts and Subscripts in Word for Clear and Polished Writing

Adding superscripts and subscripts in Word is an easy formatting way to express your writing. Whether it’s adding citations or adding a mathematical equation in your paper, you will be able to present your argument in a clear and appealing way. If you feel stuck at any point, make sure to refer to this guide for clarity, and use WPS Office for a clean, simple, and student-friendly experience to add your superscripts and subscripts.

• 1. How to add superscript
• 2. How to Insert Signatures in Word [For Students]
• 3. How to do subscript in WPS Spreadsheet
• 4. How to Add Superscript in WPS Spreadsheet [Easy Way]
• 5. How to Convert Word to PDF [For Students]
• 6. How to Check Word Count for Your Essays in Word [For Students]

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10 Best AI Essay Writer Platforms to Help You Get Better Grades

Essays are some of the most common homework assignments for students from middle school all the way through to college. And it’s not always easy to find time to get every essay done on time or write about subjects you struggle with. That’s where AI essay writing platforms can help. Most AI essay writers use powerful natural language technology to generate essays, add citations, use AI to auto-complete essay paragraphs, research subjects, and much more. It’s a powerful learning tool, and this list will look at 10 of the best options to use.

EssayGPT – Best AI Essay Writer Overall

When it comes to the best AI essay writers, EssayGPT by HIX.AI tops the list. It stands out for its highly impressive technology, capable of tackling almost any subject imaginable, from complicated science essays to in-depth literature analysis.

So much more than a simple AI essay writer, EssayGPT also offers editing and auto-complete features, helping students fine-tune and improve their work. It can automatically fill out phrases and sentences with a click, as well as add citations to your essays in various styles to suit the tone and target audience.

But EssayGPT’s feature list doesn’t end there. It also comes with built-in grammar and plagiarism checkers to ensure that your work is free of mistakes. And it has a powerful search tool that students can use to look up relevant and useful information to draw from when completing their essays.

• Industry-leading technology
• A major time-saver to help you hit any deadline
• Much cheaper than a tutor or human-based essay writing services
• Prices can add up if you use it often

Enjoy academic success with EssayGPT.

EssayWriter – Best AI Essay Writer for Researching

EssayWriter is another AI essay generator that can appeal to students at any level of academia. With its advanced technology and deep database of academic resources, it makes it easy for students to look up relevant references and sources connected to the topics they’re writing about, making it faster and easier to create informative and detailed text.

That’s not all. EssayWriter also comes with a simple citation generation, letting you make citations that are formatted to suit common standards, like APA and Chicago. Plus, it has a built-in plagiarism detector to ensure your work is original, coupled with real-time AI content suggestions to help you complete essays more quickly.

• Customizable writing styles and tones
• Sources accurate content from academic sources
• Great value for money
• Requires an internet connection to access

EssayFlow – Best AI Essay Writer for Any Form of Essays

EssayAI is a leading undetectable AI essay generator that stands out on the market. It produces high-quality, undetectable essays in great detail, with expert citations and sources listed throughout, showing you exactly how each point was made and supported.

It offers a range of customization options, allowing you to tailor your essays to specific target audiences, adjust tones of voice, select preferred languages, and more. This level of customization ensures that your essays are precisely crafted to meet your unique requirements and effectively engage your intended audience.

• An excellent undetectable AI essay writer
• Adds lots of quality citations
• Many customization features
• Needs to upgrade to unlock more features

EssayAI – Best AI Essay Writer for Undetectable Academic Writing

ToolBaz – Best AI Essay Writer for Adjustable Creativity

Next on our list is ToolBaz. Launched in 2022, the ToolBaz AI essay writer is part of an extensive suite of AI writing solutions on the ToolBaz platform. It’s fast, reliable, and ready to use at any time, whenever you need it.

This AI essay writer also has a unique adjustable creativity feature. It lets users change the creativity of their essays via a simple slider, giving the AI bot more or less freedom to get imaginative with the content.

• Completely free to use
• Useful for high school, middle school, and more
• Simple, beginner-friendly interface
• Sometimes requires manual editing

Caktus AI – Best AI Essay Writer for Improving Your Knowledge

Caktus AI is an AI essay writer that is trusted by students and teachers alike as a reliable learning aid. Instead of simply doing work for students, this AI platform, founded by Harrison Leonard and Tao Zhang, is designed to teach them and help them improve.

Caktus AI fills its essays with precise citations and the most accurate information, sourced from published essays and academic textbooks. This results in high-quality, easy-to-read output text that can help you improve in even the trickiest subjects, with prices starting at $14.99 per month.

• A vast database of academic resources
• Designed by students, with students in mind
• Flexible pricing to suit your budget
• More expensive than other AI essay generators

Essaybot – Best AI Essay Writer for High School Students

Next up, we have Essaybot. This company was founded in 2023 and has staff both in China and the U.S. It’s quickly become one of the go-to essay generator tools for many students, thanks to its ease-of-use.

With EssayBot, all you have to do is type the subject or concept of your essay into the box provided and then wait for it to create content for you. It’ll generate precise, relevant text for any subject you need help with, adding citations automatically and running a plagiarism check too.

• Very easy for beginner users
• Built-in grammar and spell check
• Offers unlimited essay downloads
• May struggle with college-level texts

StudyCrumb – Best AI Essay Generator to Use for Free

While many AI essay writing platforms charge high fees or recurring subscriptions, StudyCrumb is 100% free. Launched by the Crumb4Life company, which is based in Estonia, this trusty AI essay generator is completely risk-free and perfect to add to your academic arsenal.

Students can easily and quickly get help with any essay through StudyCrumb. It boasts fast processing times and is much more cost-effective than spending money on other tools or paying a human tutor.

• Produces relevant, good quality content
• Fast essay generation
• Intuitive user interface
• Text regularly needs manual editing

EssayService – Best AI Essay Writer for Easy Essay Generation

EssayService is an AI-powered essay generator that was launched in 2023 by a company that had previously specialized in human essay writing services. They decided to branch out into AI, resulting in the development of this clever and easy-to-use AI tool.

With the EssayService AI essay writer, users can paste their questions or subjects into a box and get instant essay generation. It also supports essay outline generation, giving you headers and talking points that you can then flesh out on your own.

• Excellent for custom essay requests
• Draws from a vast database of academic sources 
• Can save you hours on essay writing
• May struggle with complex science essays

PaperTyper – Best AI Essay Writer for Improving Your Essays

PaperTyper isn’t quite the same as the other essay writers on this list. Developed by a one-woman team, Juli Sheller, this tool is part of an entire suite of academic AI aids, including a plagiarism checker, grammar scanner, and more.

In short, PaperType has all you need to write essays, check them, proofread them, and fine-tune them. It’s ideal for students who want to do most of the work themselves, but still want to use AI to make improvements to the clarity and flow of their texts.

• Completely free to start
• Checks grammar and spelling for you
• Works at all levels of education
• Interface may be a little awkward for first-time users

Who Should Use an AI Essay Writer?

So, who are AI essay generators actually aimed at? Well, almost any kind of student can benefit from these tools. It’s important to note that many AI essay writers are capable of writing a range of different kinds of content, from persuasive essays to descriptive papers, analytical texts, and more.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter what level of education you’re at or what kind of work you’ve got to do. Every student can use and benefit from an AI essay generator. What’s more, they’re ideal for students who have very busy lives. As well as those who feel like they don’t have enough time to keep up with their assignments.

You may also enjoy big benefits from AI essay writing technology if you’re the kind of user who tends to struggle with certain subjects. Let’s say that you excel in geography but struggle with history, for instance. In that case, you can use AI to help out with your history essays and ease your stress in that subject.

What Should I Look for in an AI Essay Generator?

With all of those different AI essay writers on the market, you might not know which one you should actually use. Well, here are some key factors that you can focus on when trying to find the right one:

• Reliable Citation Generation : The best AI essay writers make it easy to add citations to your work. Citations help to make essays feel more professional and can aid in getting better grades. Look for writers with built-in citation generators, and favor those that can add citations in different styles, like Chicago and MLA.
• Grammar and Spelling Checks : Leading AI essay writers are also capable of scanning essay text to spot and fix errors. They can get rid of any little typos that could make your essay look rushed, for instance. They can also improve punctuation and grammar to produce a more professional and high quality piece of text.

Research Feature : Top quality AI essay writers should also make researching your essays a lot easier. Many of the best ones come with their own research features to help you look up relevant content. Focus on writers that allow you to find relevant content quickly to save time while writing essays.

Overall, AI essay writers are incredible tools to consider. They can help students in so many ways, easing their essay-related stresses, making their academic lives easier, saving them time, and even saving them money, too. Try one of the top 10 tools listed above and see how an AI essay generator can elevate your education.

This is a   guest post,   created for informational purposes only, and should not be considered as professional advice. Readers are encouraged to conduct their   own research   and consult with relevant experts before making any financial or investment decisions.

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