30 3 Mechanics of Writing
wrong. This creates problems not only for students whose native language is not
English, but also for English-speaking students. Here are some general rules for
tenses in academic writing:
- Use the past tense when you are reporting what you or others did at particular
times: ‘Smith and Jones reported the results of their investigation of housing
trends in their book published in 1985.’ - Use the present tense in an introduction to a chapter or section or a table where
you are outlining its contents: ‘“Why We Have Trouble with New Tasks” is a re-
view of the state of the housing industry in the USA after World War II.’ ‘Table 3
shows that in all countries car ownership increases with GDP per capita.’ Future
tense is incorrect. - Use the present tense when you are discussing the implications of some work of
yours or others: ‘Smith and Jones reported the results of their investigation of
housing trends in their book published in 1985. This work reveals that the poor-
est group in the community find it almost impossible to find adequate housing.’
Note that we are shifting from past to present tense in the same paragraph. - Use the future tense when reporting the implications of your or other work.
‘With evidence that discrimination remains common, it will be necessary to
make changes to the legislation.’
Punctuation
This book is not the place to learn basic grammar, but there are mistakes in and us-
ages of punctuation that seem to be peculiar to academic writing. I briefly review
a few of these.
Commas In general writing, commas should be used sparingly. In academic writ-
ing, a few more commas may be warranted to avoid ambiguity.
- Between items in a list, and before the final and, etc., and or: ‘their own surveys,
interviews, observations, experiments, and so on’. In a sentence such as ‘the four
main groupings were children, employees, pensioners and the disabled, and the
unemployed’, the consistent use of the list comma allows the reader to easily see
that ‘pensioners and the disabled’ are a single grouping. - After transitional words such as however, nevertheless, moreover, therefore, and
similarly. - To put a word or phrase in parenthesis. (To test whether something should be
in parenthesis, try omitting the commas altogether; the sentence will lose some
information, but should still make sense.) One comma must be placed before the
word or phrase, and one after it: ‘and, as discussed previously, the three plaintiffs
were approached later’. Leave out both, or none.
Semicolons The main use is to separate parts of a sentence that are too closely
related to be broken into separate sentences: ‘Writers of thesiese nearly always use