Academic Writing Style: Tense, Voice and Using I

Your topic is fixed, the outline is done, and the first pages are written. Then chapter three arrives, the text starts to read like an instruction manual, and you cannot say why. Your supervisor writes “please make this more academic” in the margin, and nothing at all has been clarified.

Academic writing means writing so that every claim carries its origin and nobody has to guess who is making it. In practice that means the present tense as your default, sparing use of the first person, the active voice wherever it fits, technical terms repeated rather than varied, and no words that only fill lines. Every rule below comes from a UK university library guide, not from a writing blog.

📌 The key points

• The present tense is the default, the methods chapter uses past.
• The University of Hull advises the active voice wherever possible.
• First-person use is now accepted in humanities and social sciences.
• The hard sciences still resist writing in the first person.
• Repeating a technical term is precision, not lazy writing.

What academic writing style actually is

Academic writing style is the way of phrasing in which every claim carries its origin and each single sentence stays unambiguous without a follow-up question. It is not a tone you put on, but the sum of four decisions: tense, sentence structure, word choice, and how visible you are as the person writing.

The University of Leeds Library sets out the underlying principles in its guide Tense and voice. Present tense carries established knowledge, other researchers' findings and your own conclusions. Past tense carries what you did in your methods chapter. Voice and tense together tell the reader what kind of statement they are looking at, which is why they are treated as style questions rather than grammar questions.

This is where the misunderstanding sits that makes most essays hard to read. Students who want to sound academic build longer sentences and reach for bigger words. Students who write academically do the opposite and take each sentence apart until only what somebody can verify is left. That is harder work than the convoluted sentence, and it is the actual skill being marked.

Style is therefore the last layer over everything underneath it. Topic, research question and the structure of your dissertation decide whether the content holds. Style decides whether anybody recognises that it does. How the two fit together is covered in the overview of empirical research fundamentals.

Which tense belongs in which chapter?

Academic work sits mostly in the present tense. The past tense appears where something actually happened and finished, which in practice means the methods chapter and the results. No single rule covers every discipline, but the allocation below appears across UK university guidance.

The Leeds guidance adds one detail that surprises many students: figures you have presented in a table or chart are described in the present tense, because the table still shows what it shows while somebody is reading it. The same logic explains the rest of the table. Whatever still holds at the moment of reading takes the present, whatever happened once and ended takes the past.

What ultimately applies is your department's guidance. Science subjects separate tenses by chapter far more strictly than the humanities do, and your module handbook overrides any general recommendation, including this one. Check it before you write rather than after you submit.

Can you write “I” in academic work?

There is no language rule against writing “I” in academic work, only a set of discipline conventions that differ sharply from one another. The University of Hull Library states in its skills guide Dissertations and projects: voice that considerable academic debate surrounds the question and that the move is towards more use of the first person.

What matters more than the debate is where you sit in it. The Hull guidance is precise about the split: the hard sciences mostly resist the move to the first person, while the humanities and social sciences are more accepting of it. Writing “I” in a history dissertation and writing “I” in a chemistry report are not the same decision, and neither is a matter of taste.

Where the first person works in academic writing

The first person earns its place where you describe your own procedure or defend your own position. “In chapter two I compare both approaches” organises the text and guides the reader through it. “I restricted the sample to members with an active subscription because …” makes a methodological decision checkable. Both are clearer than a construction in which nobody appears to have decided anything.

Where the first person does not work

The first person becomes a problem as soon as it turns autobiographical. “The topic has fascinated me since my placement” belongs in a personal statement, not in a dissertation. This single use is the reason the blanket prohibition exists at all, and it separates cleanly from describing your own method.

The default is therefore sparing use, in the introduction and conclusion, for your own procedure and your own judgement. The exception is none at all, if your supervisor asks for none. Your module handbook and your supervisor decide, and Hull notes that “I” remains frowned upon in science subjects in particular.

⚠️ Warning

“One” is not a safe replacement for “I”. Writing “one can observe that” only hides who is observing and creates exactly the ambiguity academic language exists to avoid. If a shared position is meant, a citation belongs behind it. If you are meant, phrase it through the text: “Chapter three shows that …”

Active or passive voice in academic writing?

The active voice is now the recommended default in academic writing, which reverses the advice most students were given at school. The University of Hull Library puts it plainly: a lot of academic writing has traditionally used the passive voice, but there is a move towards the active voice, and its advice is to use the active voice whenever you can.

The passive has not disappeared, it has changed status. Hull names the cases where it is better and still expected: where the actor is implicit because the research is obviously yours, or where the actor genuinely does not matter. “The samples were stored at four degrees” needs no agent. “It was decided to exclude incomplete responses” badly needs one.

The passive voice does not make a sentence objective. It only hides who acted.

The conflict most students run into comes from the ban on “I”: avoid the first person, and the passive is the obvious substitute. The way out is a third option in which the subject matter itself acts, which avoids the first person and the passive at the same time.

Four constructions that avoid both “I” and the passive

• The text acts: “Chapter two compares both approaches.”
• The object acts: “The sample comprises 212 respondents.”
• The finding acts: “The analysis shows a clear difference.”
• The source acts: “Author (year) disputes this reading.”

Two versions of “we” are worth avoiding. The royal “we”, in which a single author writes about themselves in the plural, now reads as dated. The inclusive “we” in sentences such as “In table 2 we can see …” presumes an insight the reader has not had yet. A genuine “we” stays correct where a paper has several authors.

Which words to cut

Three kinds of wording can go from an academic text: filler words with no meaning of their own, hedges that make a claim vague, and sentences that only announce what is about to follow. Together they often make up a tenth of a draft without carrying a single argument.

The reason this matters beyond tidiness is that every hedge shifts the claim without your noticing. “This method is basically suitable” asserts something different from “This method is suitable”, and a marker reads the difference.

Hedges and fillers that weaken a claim

The same candidates turn up in almost every draft, and they appear precisely where the writer is unsure of the ground. The hedge then stands in for the reasoning that is missing. Your word processor finds them in a few minutes, and every deletion makes the sentence more checkable.

• basically, essentially, arguably: remove the claim from testing.
• quite, rather, fairly: carry no measurable content.
• ultimately, at the end of the day: vague and often redundant.
• very, really, extremely: intensifiers without evidence behind them.

Nominalisation: when the verb disappears into a noun

Nominalisation happens when the action of a sentence moves into a noun and the verb becomes an empty shell. The tell-tale signs are endings such as -tion, -ment and -ance, paired with weak verbs like conduct, undertake and carry out. The sentence gets longer and more abstract without getting more precise.

• The implementation of the survey was undertaken in May. Better: The survey ran in May.
• An examination of the data was conducted. Better: We examined the data.
• There is a dependency of intelligence on gender. Better: Intelligence depends on gender.

💡 Tip

Read your draft once with a single question in mind: how do I say this more simply? Change nothing about the content on that pass, only the phrasing. It is the editing round with the best ratio of effort to effect, and it catches more than a grammar checker ever will.

Repeating technical terms

Repeating a technical term is correct in academic writing, because changing the label raises the suspicion that something else is meant. This is the sharpest departure from school English, where varying your vocabulary was the mark of good style.

The mechanism is easy to see once it is named. If a dissertation calls the same thing a sample in chapter one, a selection in chapter three and a cohort in chapter five, the reader cannot know whether the writer is being elegant or drawing a distinction. In a literary essay that costs nothing. In a research report it costs the reader the ability to follow the argument, which is a far more expensive loss than a repeated word.

The rule applies to defined terms only. Everywhere else you can and should vary, and pronouns are a legitimate way to avoid saying “the theory” three times in one paragraph. The condition is that every “it” and every “this” has exactly one possible antecedent. As soon as two are available, repetition wins again.

Common academic writing mistakes

Four mistakes turn up in essays and dissertations again and again, and they share one origin: all four come from trying to sound especially academic. Once you know them, you can find them in a few minutes of proofreading.

The fastest route is your word processor's search function. Three of the four can be tracked down through individual words or punctuation marks, without reading the whole thing again.

The sentence that runs over ten lines

Heavily subordinated sentences were long treated as evidence of intellectual effort. They were never a gain for the reader, and they are now regarded as poor practice. In practical terms: one sentence carries one thought. If you have to draw breath twice while reading aloud, a full stop is missing.

The tense switch in the middle of a chapter

Switching between present and past inside a single paragraph is the most common formal error in empirical dissertations. It almost always happens at the seam between other people's literature and your own fieldwork. Mixing tenses is permitted, but rarely useful. Check chapter by chapter rather than sentence by sentence.

The paragraph where it is unclear who is claiming what

If a citation sits at the end of a paragraph, does it cover the whole paragraph or only the final sentence? That question must not arise while reading. Whether the reference appears as a footnote or in brackets is decided by the referencing style, not by how academic the work is: Harvard referencing puts short references in the text, while other styles use footnotes. The guide to citing correctly covers which form applies when.

The term that changes meaning halfway through

A concept introduced in chapter one and used differently in chapter four leaves an entire argument open to attack. It happens most often with words such as survey, questionnaire, poll and study, which feel interchangeable in everyday use and are not the same thing in a research report. Fix your terms once, write them down, and hold them across every chapter.

Conclusion

Academic writing style is not a tone but a set of defensible decisions, and most of them fall on the side of clarity. Present tense as your default, a sparing and deliberate “I”, the active voice, and the same terms from beginning to end will take you further than any convoluted phrasing. When in doubt, your module handbook overrides any general recommendation, including this one.

Where to go next

• Want to know which steps come before writing? Writing an academic paper
• Looking for the order of chapters and front matter? Structure of an academic paper
• Wondering what proofreading may legitimately change? Proofreading a dissertation

Does your dissertation include a survey of your own?

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