Academic writing

In essay writing, impersonal style should be employed to maintain formal decorum

Writing is of two types when adjudged on the parameter of a writer’s presence in his writing: subjective and objective. The subjective writing is tinged with a writer’s own discretion and emotions while objective writing is deep-rooted in language which is impersonal, non-emotive and scientific.

Technically, the use of first and second person pronouns abounds in subjective writing. Informal writing is dominantly subjective e.g letter writing between friends. Contrarily, objective writing stipulates the use of impersonal pronouns and syntactical structures to usher in formal hue in academic writing that includes essay and precis writing.

That’s the blunder students commit in the precis writing. Mostly, first-person pronouns of the given paragraph must be changed into third-person or impersonal pronouns (The writer, One). In essay writing, impersonal style should be employed to maintain a formal decorum. Passive form is another handy tool to write objectively as it directs attention on the verb, not the person.

Following patterns can be used for formal, impersonal and objective writing: A study was conducted to see...; It can be argued that...; It is clear that... (It + adjective); It is necessary to... (ditto). Similarly, complex noun phrases with prepositions give an air of formality and objectivity to the sentence: The advantages of X are...; The use of AI in education.... Nouns are often used as subjects of active verbs: The results show that....

Direct narration must be eschewed in formal writing whether it is precis writing or paragraph translation from Urdu to English. Indirect narration required for formal writing makes bilingual translation tricky because of syntactic differentials. For example, the Urdu sentence “Mein ne oss se poochha kay tum kahan rehtay ho” is wrongly translated into “He asked me that where do you live.” Its informal version is: He said, “Where do you live?” In formal writing, the sentence goes: He asked me where I lived.

To use idioms and phrasal verbs in sentences requires a little attention. Instead of making crippled sentences, students must form complete sentences following cause-and-effect rule. A word must be used in a sentence in a way that a reader who doesn’t know its meaning could infer the meaning with little effort. For instance: (1) He has given up smoking; (2) He has taken to smoking. When they are constructed cohesively: (1) He has given up smoking on the doctor’s advice; (2) He has taken to smoking because of bad peer influence.

A University of Toronto study in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology asserts: “The past and future aren’t as vivid as the present. In the present tense, you as the reader take a journey with the speaker and you become immersed.” Also, the present indefinite tense maintains the formal tone and tenor of the academic writing.

Another hallmark of academic writing is the use of punctuation marks whose timing and placement regulate the law and order of the writing. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections.

A Time magazine essay titled ‘In Praise of the Humble Comma’, Pico Iyer illustrates the use of punctuation: “A period has the blinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semi-colon is a stop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again.”

The colon, in particular, is a formal mark of punctuation. It is used to introduce something that is to follow, such as a list, a quotation, a statement, an emphatic restatement, a summary or an explanation.

A hyphen melds two units forming a compound adjective before the noun modified: house-to-house search; one-man job. A hyphen is also used to form adjectives compounded with ‘well’ preceding the noun: well-known personality; well-crafted plot. However, the hyphen is omitted in such expressions when they follow the noun modified: He is a writer well versed in the art of writing.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2024.

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