Writing Tips >> Expressions of beliefs
Expressions of belief are personal opinions and beliefs. You should write them in an indirect way by avoiding personal pronouns (I, we, you) and generalisations (everyone, people) because academic writing has a style that shows academics prefer:
- Facts (objectivity) to opinions (subjectivity)
- Impersonal knowledge to personal ideas
- Precise analysis to broad generalisations.
This applies to most sections of academic writing except the methods and processes you or your team used in your research, and in the acknowledgements section. As a result:
| Example: | You can see the results confirm my view that the modifications are effective. |
| As can be seen, the results confirm a view that the modifications are effective. | |
| Example: | We all know that we can divide functional dimension summaries into indicative, informative, and critical types. |
| It is widely agreed that functional dimension summaries can be divided into indicative, informative and critical types. | |
| Example: | I believe that a definition of success is needed for my research. |
| It is thought that a definition of success is needed for this research. |
| Personal opinion and generalisations | Indirect opinion and common knowledge |
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In my view/opinion,
I believe/think that… I am convinced that… It is my belief that… I tend to think that… It seems to me that… Here, I will argue that… We all know that… As everyone knows, People say that… Society accepts… The public agrees that… From many people’s perspective, |
It is believed that…/It is often thought that…
It has been asserted that… It has been shown that… It is often suggested that… It is perhaps true that… It is valid to think that… Here, it will be argued that… It is widely known that… A common view suggests that… A general perspective is that… It is widely accepted that… It is widely agreed that… It is commonly held that… |
Acknowledgements >> Dangling modifier >> Expressions of beliefs >> Fragment sentences >> Hedging language in giving review >> Irregular plurals >> Lexical density >> Misuse of prepositions >> Organization of chapters >> Parallelism >> Responses to Peer review >> Sentence complexity >> Subjective / redundancy adjectives >> Synonyms VS repetition of key words >> Uses of acronyms >> Uses of articles before the abbreviations / acronyms
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