Week 6: Understanding and using academic style
Introduction
Style is the way people express themselves when communicating with other people. They do this through body language, choice of clothes, the tone of their voice and through images, music and language.
The way people express themselves depends on their personality, but their stylistic choices are also constrained by each specific situation in which they communicate.
This week you will look at the ways in which people adapt style to fit different everyday contexts and then focus on academic style. Academic style is the way in which language can be used to communicate in writing and to be understood in a university context.
Transcript
Welcome to Week 6.
This week you will look at academic style. This is the way in which you express yourself in speaking and writing. Some of the features of academic style are already familiar to you. For example, in previous weeks you learned that academic texts are clearly organised and follow a standard pattern. Ideas are clearly expressed and it is important to acknowledge your sources.
This week you look at more features of academic style, their use of vocabulary and grammatical structures that allow writers to express themselves more formally but also more clearly and concisely.
By the end of this week you will:
- recognise that different styles are appropriate to different situations
- recognise the different styles used by university texts
- begin to use a formal academic style.