Comparison of Academic and Informal Writing

When it comes to English writing, readers’ expectation in both language efficiency and preciseness has distinguished academic writing, as a completely separate style, from informal writing. In the following blog, a comparison of academic writing and informal writing will be highlighted in three aspects, Sentence Mechanics and Grammar, Rhetorical Structure, and Style.

Firstly, the requirement in objectiveness calls for a minimized dependency on personal construction. As the class note indicates, the use of “I” and expressions of feeling should be avoided to a great extent, and academic prose, as a whole, are required to be kept as impersonal as possible. To illustrate this point, we need look no further than the subject choices in the two articles. In the informal writing sample, the high dependency of “I”, as subjects, constantly reminds readers the purpose of this article, which is more appropriate to be considered as an expression of personal idea rather than an introduction of academic research. On the contrary, the higher priority given to the topic related nouns, as subject, brings the academic writing sample a more neutral stand and higher lexical density. 

Secondly, I think the Rhetorical Structures of the two articles are also different. For the informal writing, the paragraphs are organized in a parallel way, in which each idea is completely separate from others, and there is no logical connection between each of them. For example you can consider the subtopic in “Initiative” and “Tenacity” as two independent suggestions from the author. As a result, readers would feel easier to read each paragraph as a single idea, but would find it difficult to locate the information they are looking for. However, the academic article is written in a more logical way, and the progression of idea, like a guidepost, provides readers a clear structural pattern, from which readers can easily put their focus on the information they really care and skip the parts they have less interest in. For example, if you are a businessman who is looking for some research paper which can improve your supply chain, you can put your focus on the conclusion, or if you are a graduate student doing similar research, you can skip the introduction and go directly to the model description to see whether there is some useful idea in this paper, from which you can benefit your own research.

What’s more, the two articles are also different in style. In the informal writing article, a lot of colloquialisms and casual expressions are used to develop author’s idea. For example in the “Why get a Ph.D. part”, the author says “The most basic question every Ph.D. student must know the answer to is: 'Why the hell am I doing this?'". Through this question, the author provides readers a chance to think about the topic by themselves, which not only effectively draws readers’ attention to author’s idea, but also greatly enhances the connection between author and readers. However, in the academic writing, the ideas are conveyed like in one direction, and no such communication left between author and readers. All the information and language are provided as precise as possible.

Personally, I think the academic writing, as a more functional writing style, distinguishes itself from informal writing in its writing purpose. And all its characteristics serve to a basic idea that makes the expression of ideas more precise, efficient and objective.