General vs. Academic Vocabulary
buttons.What is Academic Language?
In ESL003, we learned about the impact of word choice on clarity of meaning and style. This unit in ESL004 will review some vocabulary strategies to help you learn and use academic and specialized vocabulary. Be sure to complete the practice activities to learn how to hone these skills.
Every form of writing has its conventions. How we write messages to our friends is different from how we write a job application; the language used in a soap opera is different from the language used on the news. And the language of academic writing has its own set of characteristics.
As a basic rule, academic language is more formal than the everyday language we tend to use for communication. But at the same time, academic writing isn't about impressing people with 'big words' or being overly formal. It needs to be clear, concise, and objective so that you can communicate your ideas effectively.
The primary purpose of academic language is to analyze and explain knowledge or to arrive at conclusions with the help of theories or other scholars' arguments. Therefore, academic language is typically analytical and relies on evidence to reach conclusions.
In academic work, we will frequently need to analyze other researchers' findings and views, formulate an argument of our own, and present our findings, all in a formal and somewhat dispassionate way. This is what is generally known as academic language.