When you write a paper for school, you're doing more than sharing your thoughts. You're joining a conversation with other scholars, professionals, and thinkers, your professor included. To be taken seriously in that conversation, the right tone and voice matter.
What academic tone is
Let's start with academic tone. It's the way you express ideas when you write for school or for a scholarly audience. It's a little more formal than the way you talk with friends, but it doesn't have to be stuffy or robotic.
Why academic tone matters
Your tone affects how your ideas are received. Writing in an academic tone shows your reader, usually your professor, that you're thoughtful, serious, and respectful of the topic. It also builds your credibility.
Four marks of an academic tone
- Clarity. Say what you mean as clearly as you can. Avoid vague or overly complex language meant to sound smart. Making your writing more complicated than it needs to be confuses you and your reader alike.
- Objectivity. Focus on facts, evidence, and logic, rather than personal opinion or emotional language.
- Formality. Write in complete sentences, skip the slang, and generally steer clear of contractions like can't or won't. Write cannot and will not instead. It may even help your word count, but that's just a silver lining.
- Evidence. Support your claims with reliable sources, which is exactly why citations and references matter so much.
Common mistakes
Here are the slips students make most often in academic writing:
- Slang or informal language, like gonna, cool, or totally.
- Generalizations, like "Everyone knows…" or "All people think…" You know the saying about what happens when you assume.
- Emotional or exaggerated claims, like "This was the most amazing discovery ever!" You may think it was, but in academic writing you're better off showing how the discovery changed the field or what others thought. Always show the evidence for a claim.
Before and after
Here are those mistakes fixed in sentences from the sample Bigfoot paper. Each "after" says the same thing with the evidence in view.
| The slip | Instead of | Try |
|---|---|---|
| Slang | Those Bigfoot hair samples were a total bust. | The hair samples attributed to Bigfoot all matched known animals (Sykes et al., 2014). |
| Generalization | Everyone knows Bigfoot sightings are just bears. | Many reported Bigfoot sightings may be misidentified black bears (Lozier et al., 2009). |
| Exaggeration | This was the most amazing study ever! | The study matched every hair attributed to Bigfoot to a known animal (Sykes et al., 2014). |
| Contraction | Researchers can't ignore the hair evidence. | Researchers cannot ignore the hair evidence. |
Developing your academic voice
So how do you develop an academic voice? Good question. Your voice is your own perspective and the way you engage with the material. Academic tone is formal, but you don't have to hide your personality. You can have a clear, confident voice that's all your own. Just make sure it's thoughtful, respectful, and grounded in evidence.
And remember, this takes practice. Nobody gets it perfect the first time, and that's OK. Part of being in school is learning to write and think in new and more nuanced ways. Your tone will improve with every paper you write and every piece of research you read. Aim to be clear, respectful, and honest about what you know, and about what you're still learning.
How PERRLA helps with tone
Tone is yours to set, but PERRLA catches one of the most common slips. Before you submit, it reads the whole paper and lists every contraction it finds, with a one-click fix for most of them. It points out an ampersand used in a sentence, too.
"can't" to "cannot"Fix
"won't" to "will not"Fix
"it's"Go to
Fix spells a contraction out. One that could go two ways, like it's (it is, or it has?), gets Go to, so you can decide. Words inside a quotation are left alone.