Informal features in English academic writing: Mismatch between prescriptive advice and actual practice

Abstract

This study empirically investigates the mismatch between English academic writing materials and actual language use by comparing prescriptive advice on informal features given in academic style manuals with descriptive practice in published academic writing. We summarise the advice about linguistic features traditionally associated with an informal style offered in 25 style manuals, and conduct an empirical study to examine the distribution of these features in a 1.87-million-word corpus of research articles in linguistics and physics. Findings indicate that the common advice given in style manuals generally matches the actual use. Despite some disagreements among manual authors, generally it is discouraged to use most informal features, but the authors acknowledge first personal pronouns, unattended this and sentence-initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs. In actual practice, published writers use these three categories of informal features frequently, but tend to avoid the other features. However, most style manuals tend to treat academic writing as a monolithic and homogeneous entity, or only discuss the use of informal features across broad disciplinary groupings, without capturing the disciplinary-specific use of individual features as evidenced in this corpus-based research. These findings have potential implications for English academic writing instructors as well as material designers.