Style
In the course so far, we have been examining the rules of composition – the grammar, punctuation, sentences and paragraph rules that help you to ensure that your work is technically correct. We now move into a murkier area – the grey hinterlands of writing style. Here you will need to make many choices, and the choices you make will not always be clear.
I would like to help guide you through these choices. As always, carefully considering your goals and your readers will help you devise a plan of attack.
"And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than impress them."
Your academic writing style should enable you to say what you want to say clearly and eloquently, and in such a way that your ideas are the main event, not the writing itself. Writing style concerns the choices you make in your writing to ensure that meaning is served. Therefore, you need to adopt a professional and consistent style that may indeed be different to the way you are used to writing for other purposes.
While you may well have quite robust ways of writing and editing that you do not wish to let go, often the dictates of academic style ensure that you have to do just that. Editing for academic purposes imposes some of the elements of style upon us, a style that we work with and make our own.
That is, we adhere to the various rules while still allowing the authorial “voice” to come through to a certain extent. This is not creative writing so the authorial voice generally is more subdued than in many other forms of writing. But in fact there are still many choices we make within the academic writing and editing paradigm. We do usually need to offload our other modes of writing and editing (such as the style you use to write to friends, or to write a letter to a newspaper) to adopt a strong academic style. No-one is born knowing how to do this, so it does take time to hone your own style.
"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."
The scoop on style
Style must be consciously adopted to suit your material, in this case the fruits of research. We must make many stylistic choices - this is an art, not a science. Style is not like grammar and punctuation, which have definite rules. Style is much more open-ended and flexible.
The best way to develop a good editing style in academia is to do it mindfully. Notice the way you write and edit. Choose your words, your tone, your grammatical voice, your verbal tense, your exact form of expression, based upon conscious decisions to increase your ability to communicate clearly to an academic audience.
Although style can vary in academia, it must still have particular purposes that aid your overall goal of clear academic communication. The main things to ensure when you adopt a style are:
- Clarity: the work is always 100 per cent clear in meaning
- Persuasiveness: the reader can accept the research findings because they are based on strong evidence and critical thinking
- Quality: the work is eloquent and polished
These sentence beginnings are too vague and imprecise. Aim for key words at the start and for more directness overall.
- “It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding….”
- “It has long been known that….”
- “In today’s modern society, it is believed that…”
- “In the global community, we think that….”
Say precisely, for example, what additional work might be needed to completely understand the issue.
There is no such thing as a “global community”. Probe what you actually mean, and find a form of words that matches meaning.
Other forms of imprecision: “…last year…” or “…a few years ago…” or “…in the past century…”, or “…next year…”
When you remove words in a considered manner, you are really testing your own knowledge base.
You can only cut words with certainty if you know precisely what needs to be said.
Avoid the temptation to reach for phrases that everyone uses all the time, particularly clichés. The best academic writing is direct, clear and fresh. Avoid phrases like these:
- Old hat…
- By the same token…
- …this day and age…
- International icon….
- …by the wayside…
- …window dressing…
- …dawn of time…
- …groundbreaking….(or its incorrect version “pathbreaking”)
Most people use too many words in their work, particularly in their early drafts. Your job as editor is to identify and remove words that are not needed – the words I call “freeloaders”. Every word must earn its place in your text.
Good academic style features well-structured, clear sentences that link information in unambiguous ways.
One way to identify freeloaders is to underline the words in the sentences you are editing that carry actual information.
When you look at the words that are not underlined, see how many freeloaders are there. Remember that the “function words” such as prepositions, articles and conjunctions may not be underlined but are still needed because the help create relationships in sentences, so you can’t just remove them without assessing their role first. Watch instead for nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs that are not underlined. They may be the ones that need to go.
Good academic style is not be overly complex. Extremely complex grammar is poor style and creates an obstacle course for the reader.
Avoid too many clauses and phrases. As a general guide, restricting yourself to no more than three clauses per sentence is good practice. Read your work out loud – this process can often help you to identify work that it too complex to be easily understood.
You must aim not to cause your readers irritation and confusion through inconsistency of usage. Like static on your television, inconsistent style can have readers throwing things at the walls.
For example, a common form of inconsistency is the way numbers are rendered in text. Your use of numbers should follow a pattern. One possible pattern is one to nine in words, then 10 onwards in numerals. Exactly which pattern you choose will depend upon the norms in your discipline combined with personal preference, but whatever you choose you should stick to it consistently.
Another area of inconsistency can be interchanging UK English and US English. Either is perfectly acceptable, so long as you always stick to the same spellings. Some of the words that are spelled differently in the different language traditions are (UK first, then US):
- Colour/color
- Travelling/traveling
- Organise/organize
- Centre/center
- Aluminium/aluminum
- Sulphur/sulfur
Formal language is more likely to be both durable and well-understood.
Ensure that colloquialisms, slang, vernacular and other manifestations of more casual style are eliminated.
Academic writing also does not permit contractions such as “isn’t” or “can’t”.
You will also be editing out emotive terms (such as “stupidly” or “irresponsibly” – the adverbs ending in –ly often have the capacity to be emotive) or attempts to persuade by emotion rather than reason. Your tone should be neutral. Neutral and informative language is more persuasive to an academic reader.
Active or passive?
You will recall from the grammar module that voice dictates sentence structures. In academic writing, passive voice is common. However, the most readable form of writing has a mixture of active and passive – this is one of the few areas where consistency is not essential. Here are examples of sentences in active and passive:
- Active: Researchers collected data on the behaviour of children.
- Passive: Data on the behaviour of children was collected by researchers.
I, you, they
Academic writing may be in either first person or third person. Second person is not usual in this form of writing (second person uses the term “you”, as though talking to another person). Third person was the more traditional style to choose, and is still used a lot. However, many people now choose to use first person, which is acceptable in many disciplines (check whether it is acceptable in yours). Disciplines that insist upon either first or third person are adamant about the correctness of their chosen person, but this is not a correctness issue.
Some argue that third person makes a piece of writing more “objective”.
The other side argues that true objectivity is impossible and it is better to be honest about who exactly is making the assertions. Here are examples of the difference:
First person
- I/We conducted research on the World Bank’s policies.
Third person
- The researcher studied the World Bank’s policies OR
- Research was conducted on the World Bank’s policies.
(The latter shows that person can be related to voice – the nature of third person writing often dictates the use of passive voice sentence structure)
Past or present
A common editing task involves making the verbal tenses of a piece of writing consistent.
The editor must be strict and have a firm of idea of the “dominant tense” in the piece of writing. This is the tense you default to unless meaning dictates that you vary it.
Some theses or papers are all in the past tense, some are in the present and some dabble in the future tense. As a general rule, keep to either the past or the present, and be consistent. Avoid the future tense.
Develop a style guide
As you progress through your candidature and write for various journals, as well as observe the stylistic norms of your discipline and the requirements of your advisory team, you will start to settle on particular styles that work best for you. You should collect these preferences into a style guide.
At the end of your degree, before you submit, you may give your thesis to a proofreader for a final polish. You should give the proofreader your style guide so that they can ensure that your style is consistently applied throughout the whole thesis. Keeping in mind that style is not about rules in the same way that grammar and punctuation are, here are few possible inclusions in a style guide. You can change these according to the requirements of your discipline and your own preferences.
This guide is a sample only:
- Standard Australian spelling: colour not color; travelling not traveling; centre not center
- Use –ise, not –ize, for example. recognise, organise.
- No fullstops in Dr, Ms, Mr, QC, etc.
- Amid not amidst, while not whilst, among not amongst.
- Number style: One to nine (in words); then 10, 11, 12…. (in numerals)
- Sentences should not begin with a numeral
- Use a comma between numbers greater than 999 – i.e. 1,000, 100,000, etc
- For millions of dollars, use $10 million
- Per cent, not percent or % (in text)
- For Australian dollars, $A100. For American dollars $US100
- Use “km” for both singular and plural forms of kilometre. Eg. “The site was one km from the coast” and “The site was 10km from the coast”.
- Likewise for the abbreviations of millimetre, kilogram, metre, etc