Why Academic Writing Can Feel Like a Foreign Language

And Three Key Ways to Help

By Randee Baty at The Lukeion Project

Every semester, professors assign academic research papers and then bang their heads on their desks as papers start rolling in that would be better suited to political stump speeches, newspaper op-ed pages, or the recruiting brochures of an advocacy group. Many high school writing programs have put such emphasis on “expressing yourself” or “letting your voice be heard” that academic writing has been pushed into the background. Unfortunately, when students get to college and begin writing any type of research paper, their “voice” is not what will matter to their professor. A well-researched and finely formatted analytical history paper, for example, on the assigned topic is the college goal. Mastering three specific skills can take a student a long way towards becoming the academic writer their college career will require.

For both high school and college writers, keeping their work in third-person is one of the most necessary and frustrating skills for students to conquer. Removing themselves from their writing can be a continual struggle. It will feel unnatural at first. Like it or not, this is the standard academic practice for one simple reason. If a student is writing a paper in Roman History, Shakespeare, or Philosophy, the paper is about Roman History, Shakespeare or Philosophy, not about the student.
Acquiring this skill is not as difficult as it might seem. Students may write, “I think Napoleon was defeated by lack of strategic planning.” What they need to write is, “Napoleon was defeated by a lack of strategic planning” or, even better, “Poor strategic planning defeated Napoleon.” A simple fix eliminates the first-person reference, makes the sentence stronger, and meets the standards for academic writing that professors will expect to see.

Students are tempted to write in first-person with, “We can see that Henry James was leaving the ending of his story open for interpretation.” They can improve it with third-person like this:
“Readers can see that Henry James was leaving the ending of his story open for interpretation.”
One of the most effective ways to remove all first- or second-person pronouns (I, me, we, us, my, mine, you, your) is to use the search function in your word processing program. Find each one and quickly correct the error. Did you notice how I slipped out of third-person in this paragraph? That’s perfectly fine because this is a blog. Your college professor will expect only third-person writing in a research project.

You may have heard that remaining strictly in third-person is a rule that is no longer set in stone and it won’t hurt for “I” or “you” to make an occasional appearance. That may be true in some limited instances for those in the upper levels of their degree programs.

For all the rest, assume that “I,” “we,” or “you” should never appear unless the instructor has specifically given permission to use these forms. Students must learn to play by the rules before they know how and when to break them. If a student has been continually encouraged to write about themselves, writing in third-person can feel like a foreign language.

Another stumbling block for some young academic writers is writing objectively. Academic writing is done to validate a position or present a logical argument. It is not meant to emotionally move the reader as a blog post, campaign speech, or fictional short story might. Objectivity is one of the keys. “Our planet” carries emotional overtones that “Earth” does not. For an academic assignment, the second one is correct and the first one will have the instructor rolling their eyes. This sentence, “In order to equal the playing field, we must look upon ourselves and evaluate the role we play in these social injustices,” showed up in a rough draft I was once grading. Aside from the obvious problems of being in first-person and using a cliché, it showed that the writer was not objective in their research. This made the academic honesty of the paper suspect. The sentence might work well in a persuasive speech or an op-ed for a publication but it has no place in an academic research paper. Learning to write objectively can feel like a foreign language to students who have been encouraged to focus primarily on their personal thoughts and feelings.

The third area of difficulty for budding academic writers is refraining from using sweeping adjectives and adverbs such as amazing, extraordinary, incredible, really, extremely, and, the one I personally hate the most, very. Using these types of words tells the instructor one of two things. First, the student author might not have had enough content and simply got busy adding words to reach the assigned word count. Second, the student author didn’t use a strong noun or verb. The intensifier was necessary to boost the “oomph factor” of a weak sentence. Either way, eliminating these words has several benefits. It makes your writing more concise. Anything that eliminates wordiness is to be applauded. It also forces the writer to think about the specific word (noun or verb) needed in this context. Instead of “ran quickly,” maybe you needed to say “raced.” Instead of “very pink,” maybe “cherry” or “coral.” All writers should write with vivid precision. Academic writers must work especially hard in this area.

Learning to avoid first- or second-person writing, learning to write objectively, and learning to avoid unnecessary adjectives and adverbs puts a student on the path to writing like an academic. Students may occasionally need the skills required for writing personal papers, but they will always need the skills of academic writing to succeed in college.