What formality actually means

Students are told academic writing is formal, which they reasonably interpret as: use longer words, avoid the first person, prefer the passive. The result is prose that is harder to read and no more rigorous. Formality in academic writing means something narrower. It means your claims are precise, your confidence matches your evidence, and your reader can always tell whose idea they are reading.

Hedging that means something

Hedging is not weakness, it is accuracy. The problem is hedging applied evenly to everything, which tells the reader nothing. Match the hedge to the evidence: a single small study suggests, a body of replicated work shows, a theoretical argument implies. Writing suggests where you mean shows is as much an error as the reverse.

The first person

Check your assignment brief and your discipline. Where it is allowed, I argue is clearer than it will be argued and makes it obvious which claims are yours. Where it is not, name the agent anyway: this paper argues, the analysis below shows. The thing to avoid is the agentless passive that hides who thinks what.

Three habits worth breaking

  • Nominalisation. The implementation of the policy resulted in a reduction of costs. Better: implementing the policy reduced costs. Verbs carry meaning; nouns made out of verbs bury it.
  • Empty openers. It is important to note that, in today's society, it can be argued that. These add words and no information. Delete and start with the claim.
  • Signposting overload. One clear statement of structure in the introduction is enough. Announcing every paragraph before writing it doubles the length and halves the pace.

A test for clarity

Read a paragraph aloud. Where you run out of breath or stumble, there is a structural problem in the sentence, not a stylistic one. Where you cannot say what the paragraph is about without rereading it, the topic sentence is missing.

Clarity is not a lower register than complexity. It is considerably harder, which is why the best academic writing in any field tends to be the most readable.