How ‘academic’ should my paper sound?
With academic writing, be it a research paper, application or other type of essay, if you want to sound smart and show that you know English really well, and can use ‘flowery’ vocabulary, be careful. I would sacrifice eloquence in the name of clarity 100 times out of 100. If you do not know exactly how the word is used and in which context, find another word. I am currently helping one of my students to prepare for IELTS. Her biggest problem is that she constantly tries to figure out synonyms for the words she already knows. And I look at her and ask what she is trying to say here. And she immediately switches to very simple English and I ask her to put that in there.
If you do not know how the word is used, no one will think that you command of English is any worse for using a clear, simple word. Academic writing is not that you sit and be like “Look how smart I am! Look how wonderfully I can write! I am like Picasso with Microsoft Word!” Academic writing is about sharing knowledge and, to share knowledge efficiently, you need to make sure everyone understands it. So you will sound very smart and eloquent if you are simple. No one will ever think you are lesser for using a clear and simple word.
If you know a five-dollar word and you know exactly how to use it, throw it out there. If you are not sure if it works very well in a sentence, you do not need to use it. Go on Dictionary.Com, type in what you want to say, and when you see a word you are comfortable with, use that one. I had a Kazakh student, he wrote a word “ameliorate”. It can mean to “finish something”. I asked him what he meant by this word and he said he wanted to say to “reduce something”. Guess what he did. He went to a dictionary and typed in “reduce” thinking “What is a really smart way to say “reduce”?” He chose “ameliorate” but it has a positive meaning, while he needed something to show rather negative. That happens a lot. There is no shame in using simple language. For applications and academic writing, it is not for people to think, “Oh, I am so smart and I want everyone to know that I am smart”. It is about “I want you to understand exactly what I think and why”. Academic writing is about sharing knowledge, not about showing how much of it you have.
What advice do you usually give to your students in your school?
The same I am giving to you. There are about 10 students with a very strong command of English in my school and that is because they practice every day. I give them writing assignments every day. Their biggest problem is semantics, meaning “No American would say that. We would say this”. It is not grammar; they need to make it sound natural.
How do you achieve that? How to make my speaking and writing more natural?
A lot of it is trial and error. For me, I am lucky because I am used to making a fool of myself in front of people in multiple languages. People laugh at me and say “Hey, that was a good try, but do not say that. Say this.” A really good way to make your speech to sound natural is to listen to TED Talks. There are TED Talks in other languages where you can turn on subtitles. It is a really good way to learn how something is English might sound in Azerbaijani or Russian because they will not translate it via its direct meaning, but they will translate it trying to convey the idea. It is not just what it means but also how it sounds. Another really good website is Reverso.Context.Net. Type in a word or phrase and the site will give you lists and examples of phrases pulled from literature and online articles. You will see how these articles translated it this way or other articles translated it that way. They also have ratings by native speakers who check and confirm that this is how one says it. This is a very good website for semantics; to see if a phrase sound formal or informal. Google Translate is not effective for collocations. Do not use it for anything other than words.
Another advice is do not write block quotes. Let us say “Corruption in America is growing.” You want to support that claim with evidence, research such as a newspaper, article, or statistics. Lots of people think “Oh, I have a page count and I need to make at least five pages. There are six lines of text that I quoted from an article on Wikipedia”. And then they go “So, anyway…” and do not talk about what this quote says at all. They think that quote should tell you that they are right so they do not have to talk about it anymore, on to their next point. Do not do it. Your interpretation, meaning what you think about this quote, even in one sentence, is worth seven block quotes that say the same thing. The quote can be two lines and then you write what you think about that quote. You showing them what you thought about what you found is a lot more important that showing that you found something. In modern academic writing in universities the minute a professor sees a block quote, he or she knows, “Haha, he just wanted to use up a page” and gives you a C.
My final pieces of advice are to avoid “I” statements in academic writing and always provide reasoning for your arguments. Every time you are making an “I” statement, think of how to change it to “how something changed the way you thought or why that thought you have is important for others to understand”. Most of college writing is argumentative and students often write “This is just my opinion.” Great ,but this does not help with paper at all. Why is it important that you think that? A lot of people suffer in academic writing because they put a statement and then do not say why they included that or why it is important. Even simple sentences starting with “This shows…” or “This demonstrates…” and then telling why you think it is important will immensely improve your paper.
The Write Space: ADA's Writing Center 