Academic Writing: Features - Explicitness
This page is part of a series that supports your academic writing development. The page introduces the general features of academic writing. Thereafter, it highlights the importance of precision in academic writing, explaining what precision means in the context of academic writing.
For Students:
In a sense, you recognise academic writing when you see it. You know, for example, that poems, breakfast cereal advertisements, and film screenplays are not examples of academic writing. However, if you are to become expert in academic writing, you will have to be able to do more than just, more or less implicitly, distinguish academic writing from other (non-academic) writing genres. Instead, you will need to begin to identify the qualities that are particular (albeit not necessarily unique) to academic writing and, with lots of practice, embed such qualities into your own writing. Academic writing, for example, is normally linear, cohering around a main argument. It avoids digression and repetition. It informs rather then entertains. And, it is written in a standard form of the language (in this case, the English language). Academic writing has a number of features. It is: formal, complex, objective, explicit, hedged, and responsible. It uses language precisely and accurately, as well as being organised and planned
What, then, do these features mean or look like?
Formality
Academic writing is relatively formal. This means that it tends to avoid colloquial words and expressions.
Precision
Academic writing is precise. If you were to write an Extended Essay (EE) in Economics, you would give facts and figures precisely. In a Higher Level (HL) Essay in English A: Language and Literature you would quote exactly from the work or text you are writing about.
Objectivity
Academic writing is objective rather than personal. Typically, it has fewer words that refer to the writer and/or reader. This tendency can vary somewhat from discipline to discipline (and sometimes within disciplines). Nevertheless, academic writing emphasises information and argument, avoiding subjective, idiosyncratic opinion. Because of this, academic writing tends to use nouns and adjectives, rather than verbs and adverbs.
Explicitness
Academic writing makes explicit relationships between parts of the text (such as an essay) and its argument. Academic writing must make it obvious to its reader how each part of the text relates to other parts of the text. Signalling words make these connections explicit.
Accuracy
Academic writing uses vocabulary accurately. For example, in a subject like language and literature, metaphor and metonymy mean different things. While these differences are maintained beyond the subject-specific discipline, the differences are not always made clear in everyday language, where writers or speakers may not feel it necessary or useful to maintain the distinction. Academic writing, by contrast, compels the accurate application of vocabulary.
Hedging
In academic writing, it is important to be clear about your position on the subject you are writing about or the strength of the claims you are making. Different subjects do this slightly differently. In a subject like English A: Language and Literature it is not uncommon to express your understanding or interpretation of language and text with some degree of caution. Hedging is the name we give to this kind of caution.
Responsibility
Responsibility, quite simply, means providing evidence and justification for claims you make. For example, if you are writing about the protagonist of a novel, making the claim that he is mad, it is insufficient to simply say so. Textual evidence is required to support your claim.
Organisation
Academic writing is well organised. It flows obviously from one section to the next in a logical fashion. Often the organisation of your writing is determined by the conventions of the text-type you are writing. For example, in an English A: Language and Literature Paper 2 essay, it will be normal to include a thesis in your first paragraph that clearly states your position in response to the essay question or prompt you have chosen. From this, all else will develop, and it is in this way that organisation becomes established.
Planning
Academic writing is always well planned. If it is well planned, its argument will be obvious, avoiding deviation or repetition. Planning, of course, is more difficult in timed examinations. Nevertheless, all good essays require some degree of planning.
Let’s now look more closely at one of these features: Explicitness
For Students:
Academic writing is explicit in a number of ways.
Academic writing explicitly signposts the organisation of ideas in a text. There is nothing mysterious about what a ‘signpost’ is; it is the words that signal the direction of your discussion or argument. It is essential to make clear the direction your writing is taking and how the various parts of your text relate to one another. It is also important that you have a reader in mind, and you want to make their understanding of your text as transparent as possible. Academic writing is not like a crime novel in which the identity of the criminal is revealed in the last few pages of the book. It’s the opposite! If an academic essay were a crime novel, the criminal would be revealed in the first paragraph.
Let’s consider some of the main moves you are likely to make in academic writing and some of the ways you could signpost these:
If you intend to change the line of argument, be clear. Read the following example:
Another major difference between the poems is their wide discrepancy in length. ‘Patterns’ is an interior monologue or meditation of 107 lines, but it could not be shorter and still be convincing. Lowell’s speaker thinks of the past and contemplates her future loneliness. Her final outburst, “Christ! What are patterns for?” (107) would make no sense if she did not explain her situation as extensively as she does. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth,’ however, is brief – a fourteen-line sonnet – because it is more general and less personal than ‘Patterns’.
If one sentence gives reasons for something in another sentence, be explicit. Read the example again:
Another major difference between the poems is their wide discrepancy in length. ‘Patterns’ is an interior monologue or meditation of 107 lines, but it could not be shorter and still be convincing. Lowell’s speaker thinks of the past and contemplates her future loneliness. Her final outburst, “Christ! What are patterns for?” (107) would make no sense if she did not explain her situation as extensively as she does. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth,’ however, is brief – a fourteen-line sonnet – because it is more general and less personal than ‘Patterns’.
If you think two ideas are similar or identical, say it in writing. Read these examples:
Lowell’s ‘Patterns’ and Owen’s ‘Anthem for a Doomed Youth’ are both powerful condemnations of war.
Despite these differences of approach and length, the two poems are similarly concrete and real. Owen moves from the real scenes and sounds of far-off battlefields to the homes of the many soldiers who have been killed in battle, but Lowell’s scene is a single space: the garden of her speaker’s estate.
If you intend your sentence to give extra information, be clear. Read this example:
In addition, in ‘Patterns,’ this metaphor is shown in warfare itself, which is the pinnacle of organised human patterns of destruction.
If you are giving examples, be explicit. Read this example:
Further examples of the metaphor are found in details about clothing (particularly the speaker’s stiff, confining gown in lines 5, 18, 21, 73, and 101 and also the lover’s military boots in in lines 46 and 49); the orderly, formal garden paths in which the speaker is walking (1, 93); her restraint at hearing about her lover’s death; and her courtesy, despite her grief, in ordering refreshment for the messenger (69).
Academic writing is also explicit in its acknowledgment of the sources of ideas in the text. While a ‘closed book’ exam, such as your Paper 2 comparative essay, does not expect you to be explicit in acknowledging the sources of your ideas, it is expected that you do so in IB assessment components that are not time-limited such as the Higher Level Essay and the Extended Essay. Read these examples:
Her response is correct, but then her belief that the band’s drumbeats are sounding out “The Brute! The Brute!” indicates her vivid overdramatisation of the incident. The “top of the hierarchy of unrealities” (Thorpe 661) is her fancy that Miss Brill herself is an actor with a vital part in a gigantic drama played by all the people in the park.
The students at Hailsham are forced to produce art, believing it expresses their inner selves. However, their paintings and poetry serve a much darker purpose for the outside world. As Gabriele Griffin explains, the school uses the students' artwork as "evidence of their status as human beings," attempting to answer whether these clones possess an inner life at all (145). This creates a deep irony; the characters view their art as personal freedom, while their society treats it as a scientific test of their right to exist.