Mini-Tutorial: Word Choice

Welcome to the affected academic writing tutorial on word choice. So word choice should first and foremost be guided by clarity. This is very important. That means that you want to avoid using words that you're unfamiliar with because you think that they're going to make you look smart. Fancy words are actually not what makes good academic writing. Instead, you want to demonstrate a strong logic and a good understanding in your paper. So, I've seen students use long, academic-sounding words or jargon at the wrong time or in the wrong way and it defeats its own purpose, because as a reader instead of being impressed, I'm instantly biased against that student's understanding. So this is kind of the special case of multi-syllabic words. Used appropriately they improve the quality of your paper partly because they help to make you more clear and more concise. The real advantage of an extensive vocabulary is to be able to communicate better. It also helps with what's called academic tone. So, tone is a very important part of academic writing. And again the main reason for this is because it allows you to convey expertise. Academic tone really has to do with the register of language that you're using. So, let's take a closer look here. To maintain academic tone you want to avoid colloquialisms, contractions, and any sentence structure that could potentially end in 'like, you know.' So let's look at a couple of examples to give you a real taste of what we mean by academic tone. 'We rounded up all the participants.' This is a colloquialism. Instead you want to consider saying something like 'We recruited 100 participants,' being specific and using the proper language. Let's look at the next example. 'And we didn't break any rules.' Again, contraction, bad. You can really take the time to explain what you have to say. 'All procedures were in compliance with ethical guidelines.' Finally, 'And then we just ran the experiment, you know?' If you can add that 'you know' to the end of a sentence, it's because it's not clear. So take it away. A good alternative would be something like. 'And we explain the protocol in detail in the next section.' The take home message here: colloquialisms, contractions, 'you know', out! You want to focus on structures like this and sentences like this. This is what we mean by academic tone. Alright. So coming back to this question. Tone is really a matter of register. I think one of the reasons people often end up using enhanced vocabulary even if they're not comfortable with it is because they want to sound -- you know -- academic. But in fact you want to sound like you! Register doesn't mean sounding like a different person. It just means sounding like the version of yourself that's engaging in a conversation with an educated, stuffy, and a highly critical audience. So the best trick I can give you here is to be very polite, because if you try to convey politeness without using any words such as 'Dear So-and-so' or 'please' or 'thank you,' you're forcing yourself into using the appropriate register and tone. So to wrap up: a great paper achieves both clarity and appropriate academic tone. Sometimes it can be hard to do both. If you ever have to choose between them, choose clarity and focus on demonstrating the quality of your logic and understanding.