The following contains some guidelines and some useful websites and literature.

When we communicate, we make a choice of appropriate language to suit the intended audience.
For example, the language you use to a friend in a text message will probably differ from the language you would use when communicating with your supervisor, employer, or parents. In contrast to fiction, which can be ambiguous and contain many different interpretations, academic texts should be clear, unambiguous and concise.

As a student at university, you will be required to write a range of different texts during your studies. These texts may vary as to type and may include lab reports, various types of essays, reviews etc., but one thing they all have in common is that they should be written according to standard academic English. English is often used as a lingua franca (a common language used by people of many different nationalities and native languages) in the research community and it is important that you learn the typical characteristics of your specific field of research.

Different fields of research

It must be kept in mind that each domain of inquiry, each research subject has its own specific features; the academic cline of knowledge can be seen as a continuum from the so-called ‘soft sciences’ such as literature, language, and history on the one hand, to the so-called ‘hard sciences’ such as medicine, physics, and chemistry, on the other.

Your department will supply you with guidelines concerning what is typical for your specific field. Follow the guidelines carefully.

Academic texts are formal in choice of vocabulary and structure often following traditional norms. To exemplify the contrast between informal and formal language, consider the following:

Informal: We got poor results from the study.

Formal: The results obtained from the study were inconclusive.

The informal sentence includes a verb typically used in spoken language, i.e., got, the use of we may be ambiguous to the reader and the sentence is written in the active voice (see Active vs Passive Voice). In contrast, the formal alternative illustrates typical academic features; the sentence is written in the passive voice, avoiding the personal pronoun we and the choice of vocabulary is formal with words such as obtained and inconclusive. In the following, we discuss and exemplify general characteristics of academic English.