ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors employ their diachronic corpus to explore the issue and investigate whether academic writing is becoming less formal and in what ways and in what disciplines. They attempt to characterize the notion of ‘informality’ and how it is understood by discourse analysts and those who advise authors on academic style, then go on to trace its use in research articles since 1965. In academic writing, formality helps to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation by minimizing the context-dependence and fuzziness of expressions, while, in contrast, informality rejects stuffy orthodoxy to project a relaxed and approachable persona. Informality in academic writing is the expression of a more personal tenor and this implies a closer relationship to readers, a willingness to negotiate claims and a positive attitude towards subjectivity. Informality in academic writing can be identified by a set of features which have a high chance of co-occurrence, although there is some disagreement about what these features are.
