The ConversationBy Mike Groves. Thankfully, nobody speaks academic English as a first language. The English of the university is a very particular form that has specific features and conventions. Sometimes, this is just referred to as “academic style”.
It used to be a matter of instinct – what felt right. But now a large amount of research is using a “big data” approach to analyse millions of words of academic writing. This has resulted in projects such as the Academic Word List, the 570 most commonly used words in academic text across disciplines, (excluding the 2,000 most common words in English). More...