Study materials
This remark is clear when heard and does not work on paper.
They looked at loads of cases and it worked pretty well.
The study examined 240 cases, and the method succeeded in most of them.
Speech leans on a shared situation: the listener sees what you see. Written text has no such support, and everything missing has to be put into words.
What speech leaves to context
A spoken account rests on a shared situation. Written text has no such situation, so everything that rested on it has to be put into words.
| In speech | In prose |
|---|---|
| they said, people think | Chen (2021) argues |
| this, that, it | this finding, this approach |
| a lot, quite a few | in 38 of 50 cases |
| recently, a while back | between 2019 and 2021 |
They looked at a lot of cases and it worked pretty well.
The study examined 240 cases; the method succeeded in 38 of the 50 trials.
What academic style does not require
The commonest error is confusing precision with weightiness. Academic prose demands neither long words nor an obligatory passive.
It was ascertained by the researchers that a utilisation of the aforementioned methodology facilitated an amelioration of outcomes.
We found that this method improved outcomes.
Most journals now accept we and the active voice. The rule about avoiding the first person is outdated, and following it blindly makes a text worse.
Where it breaks down
The first failure: vague quantifiers left in place.
A lot of participants improved.
The second: a bare this with no noun.
This shows the method works.
The third: precision replaced by weightiness.
The utilisation of the methodology facilitated improvement.
All three are caught by one test. Read your sentence as though you knew nothing about the context. Every question left unanswered is what has to be written in.
Try it right now
Describe some result from work aloud, write down what you said, then rewrite it as a paragraph of a report.
Count how many times you had to replace an approximate word with a specific one. That number measures what your speech was leaning on.