Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

Û

144f

).

Be going to

Be going to

is often used for forward reference in spoken academic style but is

generally not used for this purpose in written academic style:

[law lecture]

But do you think that there is a point where the position of consumers has to

be looked at very differently from businesses? 

[pause] We’re going to talk about

this more next week because we

’re going to be talking about the Unfair Term. 

Verb phrases: contractions

144f

Contracted verb forms are generally avoided in academic writing:

It is doubtful that such a project ever existed.

(It’s doubtful that …)

[discussing the influence of the philosopher Schopenhauer on the novelist 

D.H. Lawrence]

I am not saying that Lawrence did not read the other essays or even ‘The World

as Will and Idea’; 

I am saying that there is no evidence that he did, and we

cannot assume any but the briefest familiarity with Schopenhauer’s system.

(I’m not saying that Lawrence didn’t read the other essays or even ‘The World

as Will and Idea’; I’m saying that there’s no evidence that he did, and we can’t

assume any but the briefest familiarity with Schopenhauer’s system.)

Spoken academic presentations, however, often use contracted forms:

[university tutorial group; lecturer speaking about the writer, Jane Austen]

Maxims usually express a commonsense point of view and Jane Austen

’s full of

that commonsense.

[immunology lecture]

And you can see that this is very similar to the picture we

’ve looked at

previously but we

’ve added on two more molecules. So here’s our surface of the

T cell. 

276 | Grammar and academic English

Cambridge Grammar of English

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