Beyond words: Other considerations in achieving an academic tone

In this unit you have learnt about the types of language to use and the types of language to avoid in academic writing. What you may find, however, is that an academic tone needs something else besides the removal of individual points of language such as personal pronouns, rhetorical questions or colloquial words. It is often the case, when shifting your work from an informal style to a more formal one, that the organisation of information at the sentence level and even at the paragraph level has to be changed.

Consider the following sentence that could be used to introduce a conclusion.

The informal elements have now been removed from the sentence, yet it still reads relatively informally.

If the information in the sentence is reorganised, a much more academic tone is achieved.

(Both of these final sentence constructions have become more formal through the use of nominalisation. Click here for more information on nominalisation.)

Thus when editing your work for a more formal tone, be aware that as well as replacing individual elements of language with more formal ones, you may also have to change the way information is organised within sentences.