Principal Features of Academic Style

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Listed below are the main features of academic writing style with examples.

 

1. The use of hedging expressions to avoid claiming inappropriate certainty

e.g.     Students tend to focus on lab work, rather than writing up.

        -> A lack of funding may have led to lower safety standards.

 

2. Avoidance of first and second person pronouns (I; we; you; my; our; your etc).

3. The use of impersonal expressions and the passive voice

e.g.     It can be concluded that …

            It has been claimed that …

 

4. The avoidance of informal vocabulary and grammar

e.g.  a lot of research has been done

->  a great deal of research has been conducted

       this study aims to find out the causes of the desease

->  this study aims to determine the causes of the desease

       there were not many machines available

->  there were few machines available

      Originally, it was developed in Germany.

->  It was originally developed in Germany.

           

5. Avoidance of informal punctuation such as contractions and dashes; colons and semi-colons feature commonly in academic style.

6. The predominance of complex rather than simple sentences, and of long rather than short paragraphs.

7. The use of referencing to indicate sources.

Task

Read the texts in the previous post (Detecting different writing styles) and see if you can find examples of the above features in text numbers 2, 3 and 5. We will discuss your ideas in class, but feel free to post any comments too!

Detecting different writing styles

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Read the texts below quickly

1: It starts with a single cell. The first cell splits to become two and the two become four and so on. After just forty-seven doublings, you have 10,000 trillion (10,000,000,000,000,000) cells in your body and are ready to spring forth as a human being. And every one of those cells knows exactly what to do to preserve and nurture you from the moment of conception to your last breath.

You have no secrets from your cells. They know far more about you than you do. Each one carries a copy of the complete genetic code – the instruction manual for your body – so it knows how to do not only its own job but every other job in the body too. Never in your life will you have to remind a cell to keep an eye on its adenosine triphosphate levels or to find a place for the extra squirt of folic acid that’s just unexpectedly turned up. It will do that for you, and millions more things besides.

2: The first crucial step in the development of the modern scientific world-view was the Copernican revolution. In 1542 the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) published a book attacking the geocentric model of the universe, which placed the stationary earth at the centre of the universe with the planets and the sun in orbit around it. Geocentric astronomy, also known as Ptolemaic astronomy after the ancient greek astronomer Ptolemy, lay at the heart of the Aristotelian world-view, and had gone largely unchallenged for 1,800 years. But Copernicus suggested an alternative: the sun was the fixed centre of the universe, and the planets, including the earth, were in orbit around the sun (Figure 1).

3:

Pharmacogenetic tests identify variations (or mutations) in a person’s genetic makeup in order to predict their responses to a medicine. The results may indicate whether a patient will respond to a particular medicine, and/or whether they may experience side effects. It may also yield recommendations on dosage. The test could be done directly by analysing a person’s DNA – researchers may look for the presence, absence or change in a particular gene. Or it could be done indirectly by examining molecules that are influenced by DNA, such as RNA and proteins. Pharmacogenetic tests can be performed on blood samples, cheek swabs, or, as with some cancers, on biopsy tissue.

4:

In December, philosopher and artificial intelligence expert Aaron Sloman announced his intention to create nothing less than a robot mathematician. He reckons he has identified a key component of how humans develop mathematical talent. If he’s right, it should be possible to program a machine to be as good as us at mathematics, and possibly better.

Sloman’s creature is not meant to be a mathematical genius capable of advancing the frontiers of mathematical knowledge: his primary aim, outlined in the journal Artifical Intelligence (vol 172, p2015), is to use such a machine to improve our understanding of where our mathematical ability comes from. Nevertheless, it is possible that such a robot could take us beyond what mathematicians have achieved so far. Forget robot vacuum cleaners and android waitresses; we’re talking about a machine that could spawn a race of cyber-nerds capable of creating entirely new forms of mathematics.

5:

The recent uptake of mobile phones has been accompanied by some concern about possible health risks.1 In the general population, the health effects most often attributed to mobile phone use are non-specific symptoms. Excluding sensations of mild warmth, the most commonly reported symptoms are headache, burning, dizziness, fatigue, and tingling.2 Mechanisms to explain these phenomena remain speculative, and although the pulsing nature of “global system for mobile communication” (GSM) signals has been suggested to be partly to blame,3 experiments that have exposed healthy adults to GSM signals under blind conditions have not found any significant effects on the reporting of symptoms.4

Task

  1. What kind of text do you think they are from? (an academic book, an academic journal paper, a scientific website, a popular science book, a newspaper /magazine article
  2. How would you describe the language in each extract?
  3. Consider examples of academic or informal language use or style.  We will discuss your ideas in class, but feel free to post any comments too!

Connections

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Take a picture of something that is related to your field of study and in no more than 100 words explain the connection and why you chose this thing. You can post the picture with the written account or just the writing.

Nature-Nurture

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What makes us the way we become?

 Are we, as individuals, the unfolding of our genes (‘nurture’), or products of our environment (‘nurture’)? This question encapsulates what is know at he ‘nature-nurture debate’, one of the most contentious issues historically in developmental psychology. Although it may be clear to the casual observer that we are influenced by both what we inherit and by what we are exposed to through life, the questions remain to what extent is our mental and psychological (and physical) make-up predetermined, and to what extent affected by life experiences, particularly in childhood, and in what ways.

From studying twins and families, maybe we are able to answer questions such as:

Is our personality inherited?

To what extent can parents enhance their children’s intelligence?

Doe the environment influence our mental health?

Do our genes have a decreasing effect on our behaviour with age?

Through systematic study, we have come a long way to understanding the complexity of the original ‘debate’ as well as the limitations of such study. Although the nature-nurture debate has deep philosophical roots, it also has real-life relevance from the individual and societal level, whenever we are concerned with attempting to change human behaviour.

Tasks

  1. Read the text above and try to understand any words you don’t know from the context, without using a dictionary. Make sure you read it more than once!
  2. Find 5 words that you think are important to the text and key to its understanding.
  3. Write a short summary of the text in one long well structured sentence that provides all the information you want to include.