Academic Writing Style: Tense, Voice and Using I

Your topic is set, 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 advisor writes “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, first-person pronouns where you describe your own work, the active voice, technical terms repeated rather than varied, and no words that only fill lines. The rules below come from APA Style itself, not from a writing blog.

📌 The key points

• APA Style asks for first-person pronouns in your own work.
• APA rules out calling yourself “the author” in third person.
• The present tense is the default, methods and results use past.
• The active voice names who acted, the passive hides it.
• 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 fourth of those decisions is the one where American convention differs most from the rest of the world. In much of Europe, students are told to keep themselves out of the text entirely. In the United States, the dominant style guide asks for the opposite, and that single difference changes how a methods section reads from the first sentence.

This is where the misunderstanding sits that makes most papers 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 graded.

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

Which tense belongs in which section?

Academic papers sit mostly in the present tense. The past tense appears where something actually happened and finished, which in practice means the method section and the results. No single rule covers every discipline, but the allocation below holds across most American style guidance.

The logic behind the table is simpler than it looks. Whatever still holds at the moment of reading takes the present: the state of knowledge, a theory, your research setting. Whatever happened once and ended takes the past: your recruitment, your data collection, your analysis. Almost every borderline case resolves on that one question.

What ultimately applies is the style guide your department uses. APA, MLA and Chicago differ on more than citation format, and a psychology paper and a literature paper are held to different conventions. Check which guide applies before you write rather than after you submit.

Can you write “I” in academic work?

APA Style does not ban the first person, it asks for it. The APA Style guidance on first-person pronouns instructs writers to use first-person pronouns to describe their own work as well as their personal reactions. Writing alone, that pronoun is “I”. Writing with coauthors, it is “we”. The guidance points to section 4.16 of the Publication Manual, seventh edition.

The more surprising half of the rule runs in the other direction. APA explicitly tells writers not to use the third person to refer to themselves. “I explored treatments for social anxiety” is correct; “the author explored treatments for social anxiety” is not. The reasoning is not about readability but about attribution: the third person sounds more formal while making it ambiguous who actually did the work.

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” organizes 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 internship” belongs in a personal statement, not in a thesis. This single use is the reason the blanket prohibition exists at all in other traditions, and it separates cleanly from describing your own method.

One further restriction is worth knowing. APA also warns against the editorial “we” used to mean people in general, because readers cannot tell who is included. If you write “we tend to underestimate response bias”, name the group you mean instead. What ultimately applies is the style guide your department uses, and APA guidance governs only the fields that have adopted it.

⚠️ Warning

“One” is not a safe replacement for “I”. Writing “one can observe that” only hides who is observing and creates exactly the ambiguity APA is trying to remove. If a shared position is meant, a citation belongs behind it. If you are meant, APA asks you to say so directly rather than through a third-person label.

Active or passive voice in academic writing?

The active voice is the default in American academic writing, and the first-person rule is what makes it possible. Once you are allowed to write “I recruited participants”, the passive construction “participants were recruited” loses its main justification, which was never grammar but the avoidance of naming yourself.

The passive has not disappeared, it has changed status. It is no longer the neutral default but a choice you make for a reason. It stays appropriate where the actor is genuinely irrelevant or unknown: “the samples were stored at four degrees Celsius” needs no agent. It becomes a problem where the actor matters and vanishes: “it was decided to exclude incomplete responses” leaves the reader unable to tell whether that was your judgment call or a preregistered rule.

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

Where the first person still feels too prominent, a third option puts the subject matter itself in the driving seat. This construction avoids the first person and the passive at the same time, and it is why good academic prose rarely needs either for long stretches.

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, is exactly what APA rules out when it asks solo authors to write “I”. The editorial “we” meaning people in general is ruled out separately. A genuine “we” stays correct where a paper has several authors, which is the one case APA endorses.

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 grader 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.

Nominalization: when the verb disappears into a noun

Nominalization 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: I 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 high school English, where varying your vocabulary was the mark of good style.

The mechanism is easy to see once it is named. If a paper 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 papers and theses 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 period is missing.

The tense switch in the middle of a section

Switching between present and past inside a single paragraph is the most common formal error in empirical papers. It almost always happens at the seam between other people's literature and your own data collection. Mixing tenses is permitted, but rarely useful. Check section by section 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 parentheses is decided by the citation style, not by how academic the work is: Harvard referencing puts short references in the text, while Chicago notes style uses 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 section.

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, first-person pronouns where APA asks for them, the active voice, and the same terms from beginning to end will take you further than any convoluted phrasing. When in doubt, the style guide your department uses 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 sections and front matter? Structure of an academic paper
• Wondering what proofreading may legitimately change? Proofreading a thesis

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