28 Academic vocabulary

General

Good academic writers carefully think about their choice of words. The ‘Plain English movement‘ argues for a less formal style of language such as a simpler range of vocabulary avoiding jargon. However, academic or scientific writing must be concise, accurate and unambigious. Remember, you always write for a specific audience and readers of academic and scientific texts expect you to follow certain conventions.

Useful vs useless jargon

There is useless jargon, also called technobabble or scispeak, often used with the intention to impress the audience. The problem arises when no communication takes place because your audience does not understand you. Each discipline uses technical terminology to communicate and as a novice writer you are expected to become familiar with and use this jargon. Experts need specialized jargon (Beer & McMurrey, 2014, p.30). However, you might not always write for this specific audience and need to explain terms whenever necessary.

Academic word list

To read and write academic texts effectively you need to become familiar with the rather formal vocabulary used in this area. This section provides an overview. If you wish to develop your academic vocabulary, study the Academic Word List (AWL), a list of 570 items commonly found in academic texts across various disciplines, created by Averil Coxhead.

Here are some links to websites to practice academic vocabulary. Andy Gillet’s Using English for Academic Purposes in Higher education, or another AWL gap fill exercise by AcademicEnglishUK.  Quizzes with the AWL. 

In each chapter on Writing the specific parts of reports a link to the Academic Phrasebank is provided, a very useful resource for both native- and non-native speakers of English.

Language Focus

Word families

One effective way of learning vocabulary is learning word families (adjective, noun, verb), such as in the list in the box below:

Academic adjectives

The following adjectives are best understood and learnt as opposites. Not all opposites can be constructed using prefixes such as logical/ illogical.

For reporting verbs used in writing about previous research such as ‘The survey results indicated that …’ ‘The authors confirmed …’ go to the section on in-text references.