Using academic vocabulary

This articles aims to make you more aware of the need to use academic vocabulary and links to further resources

You need to use academic vocabulary well to get good marks in your essays. Look at the following sentences:

1. There are lots of Chinese students in British universities.

2. Chinese students have an increasingly high profile in British universities.

Sentence number 2 sounds more academic. The style is better and more suited to academic work. Your work will make a better impression on your reader and you stand a much better chance of getting a higher mark. But being able to use the right academic vocabulary doesn’t come easily! You should be reading as much Academic English as you can and making notes about phrases that you see. You should be building your own dictionary of academic phrases as you go through your studies so that you have a good list of phrases and words at your fingertips in your subject when you come to write your assignments.

Here are some suggested resources for you to follow to find out more about academic vocabulary:

• Vocabulary exercises for academic word list from Gerry Luton at the University of Victoria
• Concordancers and corpora

And here is a link to an excellent article on Lemon Grad about learning vocabulary called How to Build Vocabulary You can Actually Use in Speech and Writing.