Formality in Essay Writing

• It isn’t a good idea to write academic essays in a casual style.

Serious Voice

• If all you have ever been exposed to is movies, TV, magazines etc, then your formal style may not be very well developed.

Don’t write like you speak.

Formal Voice

• Most students don’t read formal writing. Select books that challenge you.

Read, Read, Read…..

• The more difficult a text is, the more it will help you write in a formal style. When you read challenging books, you get used to the language and difficulty level.

• It will show up in your writing.

Why?

• Use First person for personal journal entries or creative writing stories but avoid it for formal or academic writing. Especially avoid phrases like “In my opinion” or “In this essay I will…”

No First Person

• Do not address the reader directly as “you” or “your.”

No second person

Formal Voice

• Try to keep personal bias out of your essays. Don’t show strong disapproval or approval in your essay.

Keep personal opinions out.

• When you talk about MLK’s amazing “I have a Dream” speech, you have injected your personal opinion into the essay.

Avoid emotional Language.

• Avoid emotion, unnecessary humor, and exclamation points!!! Too much emotion can add bias to your writing.

• Use facts and logic to develop your ideas. Let the reader decide how they feel about your topic.

No First Person

• Slippery Slope• Poisoning the Well• Circular Reasoning

Avoid Logical Fallacies such as:

Use logic to support your ideas.

• Try to avoid phrases like, “Edgar Allen Poe was a talented guy” or “Osama bin Laden was a jerk.”

• Use “author” or “criminal.”

Avoid Slang

• Avoid using words like “cool” “stuff” or “awesome” to describe.

• Formal language commands respect.

Be specific with language.

• Writing that uses clichés comes across as tiresome and uninteresting. Too many common metaphors or similes can make writing seem unoriginal.

Avoid Clichés

• Use a website like Cliché Finder to check for possible clichés. Don’t be as slow as molasses to avoid clichés like the plague!

Clean as a whistle!

Avoid Passive Voice

• Active voice is used for most essay writing. • Using active voice makes the meaning clear for readers, and keeps

the sentences from becoming too complicated or wordy.

Eliminate: is, are, was, were, be, being ,been.

• Passive: The weather was rainy last week.• Active: It rained last week.

Avoid Contractions

• During conversations, people use contractions such as don’t , doesn’t, can’t, it’s and could’ve all the time. Never use contractions when writing a formal essay.

Place to hide passive voice.

• Contractions often hide passive voice. The contraction it’s is actually it is.

Avoid Sentence Fragments

• Sentence fragments are an incomplete sentence or dependent clause. • They usually can’t stand on their own and need the sentences around them to

make sense. • For example: Although we had a great time. (this sentence doesn’t complete a

thought.)

Avoid Run-On Sentences

• Temperatures will soar today, put on some sunscreen.• Temperatures will soar today, so put on some sunscreen.

Works Cited

• http://owl.english.purdue.edu/• owl/resource/539/01/• http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/• grammar/runons.htm