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.
