Other Things to Keep in Mind
Table of Contents
- Find your voice
- Keep your audience in mind
- Do not use contractions
- Use verbs that imply a critical approach
- You are quoting people, not documents
- Where to place footnotes
- References
Find your voice
In academic writing, it is important that you present yourself as a critical and independent thinker, who can speak for themselves and use their own words to argue their case. To a large extent, you achieve this by clearly positioning yourself in the larger academic discussion, making it clear which previous research you do and do not agree with, and highlighting your own contribution to the field. But it can also come to the fore in your writing style. When you write, try to make sure your text sounds like you, and the way you want your research to be read. Of course, your text needs to be grammatically and semantically correct, you need to reach a certain threshold of formality in your writing, and you need to keep your audience in mind (more on those last two below). But even taking those limitations into account, there is a wide spectrum of styles available to you, from highly formal, jargon rich, erudite writing, to a more approachable, widely understandable, scholarly blog-like style.
Keep your audience in mind
When you compose an academic text, always keep your audience in mind. When you are writing an academic paper, for example, try to write it for a specific publication venue (e.g., a specific journal). Look at how the venue presents itself. Is it a highly specialised journal? In that case, there may be a lot of terminology you can use without further explanation. Is your topic or approach regularly discussed in the journal? If not, try to figure out how to present it to the journal’s audience. For highly interdisciplinary journals, you will likely need more space to explain the methods, concepts, and abbreviations you use. When you write, always think: what does the reader need to know to really understand (and hopefully support) the case I am making?
Do not use contractions
While you have some academic freedom when it comes to choosing your writing style, and you should try to make the text sound like you (see above), you should also keep in mind that academic texts are written in a relatively formal register. This means that you should refrain from using things like dialect forms, colloquialisms, and contractions. For example: do not write, don’t, write do not instead. Do not write we’re, write we are instead, etc. (Except, of course, when you are quoting someone, in which case you should preserve the original wording).
Use verbs that imply a critical approach
To a large extent, your reader will (consciously or subconsciously) judge your abilities as a critical and independent thinker on the way you talk about the previous research you are referencing. This, in turn, is often coded in the verbs you use.
For example, when you use formulations like ‘X writes’, ‘says’, or ‘states’, you are just repeating the information. This implies that you take the previous research at face value, unquestioningly. On the other hand, if you use verbs like ‘claims’, ‘argues’, or ‘suggests’, this implies that you interpret the author’s arguments to represent one more or less valid position in a larger scholarly debate.
You are quoting people, not documents
We often see students use the singular form to describe sources with multiple authors. For example:
🛑 Bad Practice
Baillot and Bush (2021) claims […].
This sounds ungrammatical, because a singular verb is used to express the opinion of multiple people. Instead, use the plural:
✨ Best Practice
Baillot and Bush (2021) claim […].
Think of it this way: what we are interested in here, as researchers, is not the document itself (here: a published paper), but the claims made by the authors in that document. Like with your choice of verbs, this nuance also signals to the reader that you treat these claims as as expressions of opinions in a larger discussion, rather than placing blind faith in a peer-reviewed document.
If using a plural verb in this case sounds weird to you, remember that you van always separate the document from the author(s) in your formulation. For example:
✨ Best Practice
In their 2021 paper, Baillot and Bush claimed […].
Where to place footnotes
Footnotes should always be placed after all punctuation that is attached to the previous word. This includes commas, semi-colons, quotation marks, full stops, and closing parentheses. For example:
✨ Best Practice
This is an example with one footnote attached to a random word,1 another one “attached to a quote”,2 and a final one attached (to a parenthesis).3
References
Baillot, A., & Busch, A. (2021). Editing for Man and Machine. Digital Scholarly Editions and their Users. Variants. The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, (15–16), 175–187. https://doi.org/10.4000/variants.1220