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539 Glossary for any unfamiliar terms

Grammar and academic English | 277

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Personal subjects and active voice are also common where speakers/writers

provide textual signposting:

Throughout the literature, these pedagogical themes emerge: build a large sight

vocabulary, integrate new words with the old, provide a number of encounters

with words, promote a deep level of processing, facilitate imaging and

concreteness, use a variety of techniques, and encourage independent learner

strategies. 

I will now discuss each item in turn. 

(compare: Each item will now be discussed in turn.)

✪

I think

is less commonly used in academic writing than in everyday language,

and expressions such as in my view/opinion, I would argue/suggest, it is

reasonable to suppose/conclude/suggest/

etc. are preferred when the writer is

giving a personal opinion:

For example, the counting system, with its decade structure, certainly helps

us to make complicated arithmetical calculations, but the experience of

doing so also transforms our understanding of quantity, according to

Vygotsky. It is a simple, testable and provocative idea whose time, 

in my

view, has still to come.

I would argue that different models are appropriate at different times.

(I think (that) different models are appropriate at different times.)

Get-

passives are very rare in academic writing, but are more frequent in spoken

academic style:

[lecture about the alimentary system]

So particularly in middle-aged people who take Amatrozol, they’re at a great

risk of food poisoning because the bugs which the acid kills off don’t 

get killed

and they make it down through the gastrointestinal tract and give them a nasty

case of food poisoning. 

(‘…are not killed’ would be expected in written academic style)

Get

-passives and be-passives may occur side by side in spoken academic style:

[microbiology lecture]

Many viruses 

get taken up by cells of the immune system of one sort or another.

And they 

get transported to the lymph nodes and swollen lymph nodes is a

common feature of many virus infections. And what’s happening is that as the

virus

is taken to the lymph nodes, there is an intense immune response within

the lymph nodes so the lymph node swells in an attempt to try and eliminate

the virus infection.

278 | Grammar and academic English

Cambridge Grammar of English

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