Academic Writing Support

When you discuss ideas or data in your written assignments, you should use cautious rather than assertive language. This means that you should avoid expressions such as:

clearly	obviously	without a doubt	certainly
undoubtedly	definitely	there is no doubt that	it is a fact that

You should also take care when using words like always, never, every and all.

The reason for this is that academic writing usually reports on research, and in your research area there may be information that you have not found, exceptions to the rules that you find, and the situation may change over time. Therefore you need to use cautious language to avoid the possibility of people saying that you are wrong. BE CAREFUL: in the academic world teachers are looking for their students' mistakes, and researchers are looking for each other's mistakes. Criticizing mistakes and correcting them is part of scientific method, and is therefore common, and is regarded by researchers as a good thing to do.

• able
• advisable
• bound to
• concerned
• important
• likely
• necessary
• possible
• supposed to
• vital

• advise
• believe
• intend
• propose
• recommend
• suggest
• wish

• arguably
• probably
• maybe
• possibly
• perhaps
• surely

First, this needs to be referenced, the student is not an expert. Second - the student is talking like they know everything - in other words, the student is talking like an expert. There is no sense that it might not be important (or at least not very important) to some businesses - like small one person corner stores.This is very 'argue-with-able.'

Perhaps -

An action plan is usually very important for most businesses.

OR

An action plan is usually very important for medium to large businesses.

• Usually - Lexical Modality
• Most - Lexical Modality
• Medium to Large - Lexical Modality

This statement makes this necessarily true of all companies. Adding modality will increase the 'less-argue-with-ability' of this statement

Secondly, companies may waste resources if the goals are not clear

OR

Secondly, if organizational goals are not clearly defined, resources may be wasted.

• May - Modal Aux. Verb
• If - Zero conditional

Notice the change of the sentence structure too, always put the most important part of the 'what you are talking about' at the beginning of the sentence. Wow! Perhaps I should modalize that - it is usually better to put the topic of the sentence at the beginning. Check out Theme and Rheme coming soon.

Besides the redundancy of 'business' and 'company' (we know when you add extra words to make up the word count), how can the writer know this? Has the writer worked in every business and company? The writer is most likely right, but we don't do this in academic writing.

In many companies...

In most companies...

...there are often mistakes made....

...there may be mistakes made...

• Many - Lexical Modality
• Most - Lexical Modality
• Often - Lexical Modality
• May - Modal Aux Verb

Same issue, the author has made a blanket statement and has not considered that there may be other options or reasons. The statement could be completely true - if so, make it a quote. But if it is not a quote, you need to allow for other possibilities and reduce the impact on the reader. This is academic writing.

Long term goals are often the direction the owner wants for the company.

OR

The direction the organisation owner wants usually informs the long term goals they set.

• Often - Lexical Modality
• Usually - Lexical Modality