This lesson is about using Academic Tone and Language in your writing. When we talk about tone, we're talking about the attitude of the writer and this is controlled by the words that the writer uses. Academic language should be formal instead of informal and we'll talk about ways that you do that. One way to be academic in your writing is to use third person pronouns instead of first and second person pronouns. First person pronouns are the things that refer to yourself like I and me. Second person pronouns are things that refer to a person you're speaking to like you and your. You do not want to use these types of pronouns in your academic writing. If you need to use a pronoun, use a third person pronoun like he or she or they and the possessive his or her or their. These are just some examples. If you want to learn more about what kind of pronouns you can and cannot use, you can look up on the internet third person pronouns or first person pronouns. Just remember in academic writing, you should use only third person pronouns. Another thing that will make your writing formal instead of informal is avoiding slang. Now when you learn English, it's fun to learn the slang words and those are very useful for talking to people, but in academic writing you should avoid them. Here are just a few examples. If somebody loses their cool, instead you can say that they become angry. This is more academic. 24/7 is a common slang term to mean all day or all day and night. Screw up means to make a mistake. Bummed means disappointed. Instead of using the slang word on the left in your academic writing you should try to think of an expression that has the same meaning, but is more formal. Contractions are also informal. So you should not use them in your academic writing. On the left here are some examples of contractions. Can't, won't, he's. Instead of using the contraction, write out the full form, which you can see here on the right. Again, these are just some examples and there are other contractions that you should also avoid using. This is how you can make sure to use academic tone. Avoid overly emotional language, but there are some words that used in certain contexts are overly emotional. People use them, because they're upset about something. Maybe they're very angry, we should not use that kind of language. Now one way to persuade is to use emotion, but you want to be careful about using overly emotional language. So calling people idiots is one example of something that is not formal and not academic, instead you can just say people who disagree. Murderers is also a loaded word, so you might consider using violent criminals instead. Now you might say, why do we need to be polite to murderers? I'm not saying that. But if you use too much emotional language, your reader might be turned off, they might not think you're being logical. Another example is executed in cold blood. This is kind of a cliche, which we'll talk about in a minute. But rather than use this extreme language, it might be better just to use the word killed and you might think killed is overly emotional, so you could think of something else instead. These are just suggestions and all of these have to do with context. So, it just depends on the particular situation you're writing about. Humiliating might be another one that is overly emotional. It has a little stronger meaning than embarrassing and shows a little bit of a judgment, so you might want to avoid using that word. Pro-death is a term used in the abortion debate and this is an example of overly emotional language, better to use pro-choice. Similarly, gun nut is a term used in the guns debate and it's overly emotional as well. Instead of using that, you should say gun-rights supporters. Avoiding overly emotional language will help you to have an academic tone in your writing. Also for academic style, you want to avoid cliches. A cliche is an an overly used expression, these are things that we hear all the time and they are not considered to be good writing. Often, students want to write in today's society. This is a cliche expression. Instead of using this, just say recently or today if you have to. This day and age is also a cliche that student's like to use. Instead of this cliche, just say now or today and then here are a few other examples. Time will tell, read between the lines and more and more. More and more is a cliche and it's not necessary to use that expression, just say more. You might be wondering why the words on the left are not okay. They sound like good English. Well, they would be okay probably in speaking. We hear them all the time, but because they're cliche we want to avoid them in our writing and while we're talking about academic writing. I just wanted to mention a few other tips, you also should not use exclamation marks shown here. This would also be considered overly emotional. You never want to seem like you're yelling or shouting at your reader, so don't use exclamation marks in your academic writing. You also should avoid questions. You might have learned before that a question can be used as a thesis statement. This is not true in advanced academic writing. As this statement, remember should be an arguable statement. So don't use a question, you also should not use questions as topic sentences. Again, your topic sentence should have the topic in controlling idea for the paragraph. If you write a question, it seems like you don't know what you're writing about. So try to avoid questions. And finally, don't be wordy. Always try to say things as clearly and directly as you can. If an expression has five words and it can be stated the same way in one word, it's better to use the one word, so that your writing is not wordy. So to review remember, don't use third person pronouns in your academic writing. Avoid using slang, which are common phrases in spoken English. Avoid using contractions which are the shortened forms Instead use the full form of the words. Also avoid using overly emotional language that may make you seem like you're not a rational, logical writer. And avoid using cliches, which are over-used language. And instead of using the cliche, just think of your own words that have the same meaning. These are all important things to remember about academic tone and language, which are necessary when you write a research paper.
