Education

Purpose and Advantages of Tentative Language in Academic Writing

English is a universal language, and it is important to learn it if you want to communicate effectively with people throughout the world. Academic papers are written by the researcher so that people can know them by acknowledging their contribution to a particular field. To universalise the scope of your literary document, it is important to learn and communicate effectively in a universal language that is ‘English.’ Using different idiomatic phrases, learning the correct use of tense or form of verbs, and expanding your vocabulary are not sufficient; rather, you must use a number of other things to write effectively. Thereby, this article will help you know ‘tentative language’, a most sought-after academic writing style, in detail.

Tentative language- a brief introduction:

Tentative language is the formal style of writing that helps researchers maintain clarity in content. Hedging or vague language are other terms relatively common for tentative language. Mostly academic writers take benefit from this type of language as academic writing is all about stating information that may or may not be true. There are many points in academic writing when an author only wants to put forth ideas instead of stating definite answers to scientific queries. Especially at the start of a research project, when you only have a handful of possible answers to a problem understudy, tentative sentences help clarify that the author is still not confirmed about the problem’s exact solution. All in all, the use of tentative language in an academic paper is to signify that the fact or statement is still not proven.

Every novice writer must learn the proper use of tentative language in a research paper. It is important to convey the true sense of your writing. To know its use in academic paper writing, you can also register for the coursework help offered by coursework writing services.

Purpose of tentative language in academic writing:

As a matter of course, academic writing is the formal style of writing that helps students to share their views on a particular topic to develop conceptual understanding and convey messages to the public. In this way, a tentative style of writing is very important for academic writers as it aids them in drafting well-structured paragraphs. It helps them to introduce unique claims as a topic sentence of each paragraph and use evidence to warrant the claim.

Use of tentative language:

It helps writers share their opinion in the academic document by using the words like maybe, and perhaps. Let’s see how it works:

  1. Most probably, the majority of the student needs consultation about the process of the dissertation writing process. That is why the number of students seeking commercial dissertation writing services has been increasing each year.
  2. The drop in the blood glucose level of the experimental mouse may be due to long starvation time than needed.

 In both of these examples, the use of the words likes most probably and may be in sentences softens the statement by describing that the author is not sure about what he/she said. In the same way, other words such as may/might/can/could tend to appear to, likely, possible, and seems to can also turn your writing style into tentative language.

Advantages:

In academic writing style, by using tentative language, you can get several advantages. The following are a few of them:

  1. It helps prevent you from sharing any false information with your reader. The use of tentative words lets your reader know that the given statement may be true. Thus, they will not get the wrong meaning by reading your article.
  2. It helps you introduce cautious versus certain claims. For introducing proven facts and statements in academic writing, you can find confirmatory words such as ‘as per verified fact,’ ‘a theory states, and many more. However, the presence of tentative words refers to the cautious claim.
  3. It gives space to the writer as no one can read all pieces of information published on an area of interest. You can utilize this space to close knowledge gaps by stating what you think about the fact.
  4. It prevents academic researchers from forcefully proving something true without having concrete assertions. In this way, it helps writers only share information that is valid or worth sharing.

Final Thoughts:

As a big picture, the word ‘tentative’ is very useful for researchers as it allows them to play with ideas. Tentative research statements refer to the hypothesis to be tested using a proper research design that helps in identifying the relationships between variables. However, the term tentative language helps show uncertainty in the claim. In one case, it allows researchers to switch between ideas, while in another, it helps show probability.