hello and welcome to academic English UK today's video is on academic style in academic writing all the links are below but if you want further information then go to our website forward slash writing okay we're going to start with a definition of academic style so academic style is the conventions often associated with academic writing now although there is much debate over what exactly academic style is generally there is an agreement among most academic English teachers to the key elements that should or should not be included the following is a list of the do's and the don'ts so before we begin I'd like you to think about what you should not do in academic writing and what you should do considering academic writing style so to give you an example know idiomatic or colloquial language should be used and the yes would be academic vocabulary should be used such as the academic word list pause this slide and see if you can think of four or five knows and four and five yeses okay so the knows no phrasal verbs phrasal verbs are seen as informal these are verbs plus prepositions and there you should be limited and alternatives should be found personal pronouns i we in my opinion again these are seen as informal they create informal structures and there you should be limited some universities and departments do not accept I in written academic essays contractions it'll should be written in full form for example questions is not common to use questions forms in academic essays and positive statements should be written personal adverbs again personalizing language creates a more narrative feel so words like surprising unfortunately should be omitted numbering and bullet points in paragraphing is not common vague language such as and so on etc is also not normally accepted and we should be more specific repetition repeating the same words constantly is seen as lack of vocabulary and an inability to use synonyms finally basic language that we use in spoken English should be avoided in academic writing here are some examples with possible alternatives ok the yes is yes we should be using more passive structures so for example language like we analyze the data could be changed into a more formal structure the data was analyzed we can also take this one step further and make it more complex by using nominalization or now structures by taking the verb analyzed and using it as a noun an analysis of the data showed we should be using referencing systems we should be using cautious or tentative hedging language these kind of words these adverbs and verbs are used just to show that we are not a hundred percent certain of the facts that we state we should be accurate in our vocabulary and show the differences between keywords and we should be precise and show the exact specific figures so being specific is a key part of academic writing right if you would like to test yourself here is the same slide with the words omitted please pause this and see if you can name some of the nose and the yeses okay academics I'll practice so see if you can rewrite this sentence so it's more academic another thing to think about is the chance of crying getting worse so pause this slide and see if you can rewrite it please answer so the first thing you should do really is look at the sentence and see if you can highlight the informal or non academic words so here we have thing think about phrasal verb chance and getting our informal words from here you should perhaps go to the Internet something like the Saurus comm is a good website to go to to check synonyms so if I put anything for Soros calm highlights the key words that are specific to that one word and the brighter orange the key more frequent words and the lighter orange the less frequent where's connected to that word you can also use Google and Google you can put anything plus in and this will highlight a whole list too and you can pick words that you feel are appropriate to the word in context so through that I come up with a list so I could use thing area aspect feature point or think about I could change to consider note understand acknowledge chance possibility probability situation and getting them the most common similar word to this is becoming I then choose which word I'd like to use or which is the most appropriate so here I'm choosing aspect consider possibilities becoming and then I rewrite the sentence so another aspect to consider is the possibility of crime becoming worse I can take this to a further step which is binominal izing it so here I'm changing main verb into a noun form so I take consider and I turn it into the noun of consideration consideration with a preposition and it's done and it's more academic so I would like you to do these exercises your first one please pause this slide and see if you can rewrite this using some of the information you've learned from today on sir currently the rates of unemployment is at an unprecedented level see pause this slide see if you can rewrite it answer it has been proposed that by 2017 a vaccine for malaria will have possibly been discovered notice hedging cautious language next pause the slide answer after 2013 the Japanese property market in-house value fell dramatically or since 2013 the price of property fell dramatically in Japan for all of these exercises there are a variety of answers and these are just some of the possible answers you could use if you want more then please go here academic English UK / academic style where there's a worksheet and everything I've talked about today you can download unfortunately it will cost you 50 pence but it's a good investment and there's lots more on our website a lot of what I've done today has been taken from this book academic writing a handbook for international students this is stephen bailey 2014 it costs about 25 pounds and here's the link here connected to the publisher thank you for watching my video today if you would like more information on academic style or academic writing please go to our website forward slash writing thank you