Word Choice for Scholarly Voice

Full Article Available HERE


Introduction

When writing for faculty and your peers in college and beyond, you will be addressing a formal audience, and you will want to use scholarly language. This means you should use simple and concise language, and you will eliminate unnecessary information. According to APA (2020), "Say only what needs to be said in your writing" (p. 113).

Tips on Word Choice

  • Avoid casual language. 
    • Eliminate contractions ("can't," "won't").
      • Take a moment to conduct a ‘search’ in your paper for the system to ‘find’ contractions and the words very, etc.
    • Eliminate metaphors or figures of speech ("her writing was as clear as mud"), slang expressions or cliche phrases ("she'll get over it").
      • Take a moment to look through your writing for cliches, slang expressions, and figures of speech. 
      • You want your writing to be precise and specific. As Claire Helakoski states: APA states to be as literal as possible and avoid expressive language. Some expressions might be “shines a light on”, “on the other hand”, “in the light of day”. All of these are perfectly fine expressions in conversation, but they aren’t compliant with scholarly tone because there aren’t literal lights, changes in the time of day, or two hands. Ask yourself if you’re being literal in your descriptions and explanations, and revise if not.
    • Eliminate excessive use of adjectives and qualifiers ("very," "major").
      • Adverbs (like "interestingly," "clearly," "ideally") are unnecessary qualifiers you’re placing in your work and don’t enhance meaning but instead highlight how you’d like the reader to feel. By revising to remove these adverbs, you streamline your work and create an objective scholarly tone.
  • Use personal pronouns carefully ("you," "we," "us," "our"). Generally, you also want to avoid using the personal "I" in an academic paper unless you are writing a reflection paper, are writing a personal narrative, or are referring to research that you have conducted.
    • "Being precise and specific is important so your reader knows exactly what you’re writing about. Instead of writing “you” or “they,” for example, replace those terms with the specific population you mean. Replace “it” and “things” whenever possible with the more specific term" (C. Helakoski).
  • Use shorter sentences. Shorter sentences are the best way to start your initial draft.  However, if all you have written (by the final version) are simple sentences, these will seem choppy to the audience.  Short sentences are not the same as simple sentences.
    • Once you are working on revising and editing the draft, you can combine shorter sentences into compound, complex, and/or compound/complex sentences so that the sentences aren’t choppy. 
    • The variation from simple sentences and compound, complex, or compound/complex sentences helps the audience feel a nice flow in your writing.
    • Do not use big words for the sake of sounding scholarly (i.e., "The individuals utilized their writing utensils in order to complete the learning tools in the learning institution"). It would be easier to instead write, "The students used pencils to fill out the answers on the test at school."
  • Eliminate the Thesaurus. Use standard English words that regular people would understand.
    •  If someone would have to look up numerous words from one of your sentences to understand what you are trying to say, then you have not properly reached the audience.
    • While you do not want to ‘dumb down’ your writing, it should be average, intellectual word choice in academic writing.
  • Be consistent with your labels. Use gender inclusive language ("police officer" rather than "policeman"). Avoid placing gender identifiers in front of nouns ("male nurse," "female doctor").

Word Choice (Diction) Video

Note that this video was created while APA 6 was the style guide edition in use. There may be some examples of writing that have not been updated to APA 7 guidelines.







For more help with Scholarly Voice, you can visit any of these links.  However, since these are from another school, always check with your professor to make sure that these ideas are according to your class’s standards.

 

o   Writing Concisely

o   Varying Sentence Structure

o   First-Person Point of View

o   Second-Person Point of View

o   Introduction

o   Tips on Word Choice

o   Word Choice (Diction) Video

o   Related Webinar

o   Webpage Feedback

o   Using Academic Diction

o   Commonly Confused Words

o   Verb Choice

o   Verbs That Introduce




Content for this section was adapted from Walden University and can be found HERE.


Cited Resources

Helakoski, Claire (2018). "Simple, Scholarly Voice Fixes."  https://waldenwritingcenter.blogspot.com/2018/07/simple-scholarly-voice-fixes.html

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