Grammar and style

There are many online guides to (UK) English grammar and punctuation (see ‘Useful Resources’ below). Here are just a few common forms of punctuation that often given students (and teachers!) trouble:

Colons vs. semi-colons

Colons are used to introduce lists.

Eg. You will be reading the work of three social theorists: Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. 

Colons are used in titles.

Eg. Politics of scale: Colossal containerships and the crisis in global shipping. 

Colons can be used to introduce direct speech.

Eg. One of my interlocutors told me: ‘I wish it were easier to travel.’ 

Semi-colons are used specifically to separate two independent but related clauses.

Eg. Anthropology is a unique discipline among the social sciences; unlike statistics or sociology, it relies primarily on ethnographic method and participant observation. 

The clauses separated by the semi-colon should be able to stand alone grammatically, while colons can be used to introduce lists, sentence fragments, or dependent clauses. 

Dashes

According to British conventions of grammar, two single dashes or hyphens (-) are used to mark a disruption in the flow of a sentence.

Eg. A formative assignment – once it has been marked – can help assess your understanding of the module’s readings and lectures. 

A single dash or hyphen can also be used on its own to mark a disruption at the end of a sentence.

Eg. And that was all he had to say on the subject – or was it? 

Often commas and single dashes or hyphens can be used interchangeably.

Eg. A formative assignment, once it has been marked, can help assess your understanding of the module’s readings and lectures. 

Long dashes can be used in the same way. This is largely a question of preference and word processing defaults, but do make your usage consistent throughout your essays. 

Quotation marks

In the UK, single quotation marks (‘) are used, rather than the double quotation marks (“) used in other countries. Quotation marks are used to mark off speech, quoted material, borrowed/colloquial language, and to call attention to certain words or phrases. Use double quotation marks only to mark a quote within a quote.

Eg. In the US, British biscuits are referred to as ‘cookies’.

Eg. ‘Culture’ is difficult to define.

Eg. According to Smith, ‘interlocutors generally don’t use the word “culture” when speaking about their lives’. 

Quotation marks should be placed logically in relation to punctuation marks.

Eg. The woman announced: ‘Class will start in ten minutes.’ (Quotations enclose a full sentence ending in a period.)

Eg. In his most famous volume, Foucault asserts that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’. (A period follows a quotation that is not full sentence.)

You may want to organise your essay or dissertation in a layout that follows these suggestions:

(1) Margins should be 1 inch/2.5 cm all round.

(2) Section headings must be clearly indicated or numbered in a consistent way.

(3) Spacing may either be one-and-a-half, or double.

(4) Font size should usually be 12pt.

(5) The Bibliography should consist of references only, which means that work not cited in the text should not appear in the Bibliography.

(6) Quotations: Long quotations (4+ lines) should be intended with no quotation marks, shorter quotations should be incorporated in the main text with quotation marks. Author’s name, etc., should appear at the end of quote before the full stop, and quotations should not be in italics.

An essay is a formal, written mode of communication. It should be word-processed, spell-checked, and proof-read. All essays should include a short bibliography which should list those works actually used for the essay (i.e. it should not just be copied out from the reading list). All essays should use standard-form citations in the text of your essay, following the model of the major anthropology journals, such as JRAI. Please consult the Student Handbook or ask your mentor about specifics. 

The maximum lengths for assessment essays, extended essays, and dissertations will be specified on Moodle for each assignment. Formative essays are not examined, but there may be a word count specified (generally no longer than 1,500 words).

Do not go over the word count! Not only do you risk incurring penalties, it has been set intentionally to help you develop a concise writing style and to differentiate kinds of writing (e.g. a position piece or reading review, versus a full-length research essay). Some people write in a more condensed style than others, and an essay below the word count can be just as effective as one that meets it exactly. Below are a few tips for shortening your essays:

(1) Before you begin cutting individual words, review the layout of your essay and visually assess which paragraphs or sections are longer than others. Work section by section to cut unnecessary description or repetition.

(2) Simplify your task as a writer (and the work of your marker) by explaining one idea at a time and cutting out explanations that don’t contribute directly to your conclusions.

(3) Identify run-on sentences and break them down or rewrite them.

(4) Try to use active verbs as much as possible (‘He wrote the book in 1968’, instead of ‘the book was written in 1968’). This cuts words and makes for easier reading.

(5) Take out adjectives, adverbs, (‘The book was popular’, instead of ‘the book was relatively popular’) and words that make your writing sound uncertain (‘It could be said...’, ‘it might be true...’) in favour of direct language. 

You will read a great deal over the course of your degree, and not all of it will be very well-written. Some papers or chapters will contain excellent thinking, but delivery will be poor. There’s no reason you can’t do both: demonstrate excellent thinking and deliver that thinking in plain, simple language.

Try to avoid:

(1) Using obscure or lesser-known terms where well-known or self-explanatory terms would suffice (e.g. the word ‘prolegomenon’ may sound awesome, but 'the critical introduction to the book’ will suffice!)

(2) Using adverbs and adjectives excessively. When you’ve completed your essay, use the find function in your word processor for anything ending in ‘-ly’ and ask yourself if you really need them. Go over your writing and search for adjectives and do the same. This will make your writing less flowery, and it will help you reduce your word count.

(3) Writing very long sentences with multiple clauses. Use the find function in your word processor for commas. Ask yourself: could the sentence end there and then next one stand on its own somehow? Would it make your writing punchier and more accessible?

(4) As a counterpoint to point 3, be careful about breaking sentences into ‘fragments’. Writing something like ‘The police in Colombia are institutionally racist. Further disadvantaging vulnerable communities.’ may initially seem ‘punchy’ and accessible. However, the text after the first full stop is not a valid sentence in its own right, because it lacks a ‘finite verb’, i.e. a verb that has a subject and shows tense. The correct way to express this point is as a single sentence: ‘The police in Colombia are institutionally racist, further disadvantaging vulnerable communities.’

(5) Repetition. Sometimes, we get quite attached to certain phrases. We don’t notice that we are using them excessively. This applies to common verbs (‘shows’, ‘illustrates’, ‘demonstrates’, etc), as well as conjunctive phases (‘not only... but also...’, ‘on the one hand... on the other hand’, etc). Variety is key!

Polishing your essay

Once you’ve written your essay, try reading it out loud either to yourself or to a non-specialist.

Do some sections suddenly not make any sense? If so, think about the order of your sentences.

Does one follow from the other? Are they leading the reader somewhere? Have you stopped to tell the reader where we’re going, where we have been, or where we are now?

Try mixing it up! Go over the articles or chapters you have read to see how other authors keep their writing fresh. 

(1) Read the following paragraph, which is based on a paragraph written by Dr. Deborah James. It has been altered to demonstrate common issues in students’ writing:

It is important to point out that life in debt in South Africa is not slavery because it is much more complicated than that and because having access to credit brings people different kinds of freedoms. Credit is a topic that has been explored by other anthropologists in the past, including Clara Han (2012) who talked about credit allowing people to be a part of consumerism and aspiration. Still people are aware that they are living a ‘loaned life’, which means they have to deal with the contradictions of knowing that debt is necessary to actualize dreams of a better world in which better family relationships are possible but also they are unable to repay creditors which is disabling and can even destroy valuable relationships. This is a very problematic situation with many different values involved. This will be explored in the following essay.

(2) Was this paragraph easy or difficult to read? Was it easy to understand what the paragraph was about and what the author’s argument was?

(3) Read the following paragraph written by Dr. Deborah James (the original, unaltered version).

‘Life in debt in South Africa is not pure slavery. Instead, it has an ambivalent character. For the likes of Mmagojane's children, as Clara Han (2012) found in Chile, access to credit allows people to live a life of consumerism and aspiration from which they were previously excluded. But they are aware that, since these things have been given to them on tick, theirs is a ‘loaned life’. The debt is necessary to actualize dreams of a better world in which harmonious relations with family members might be possible. But being unable to repay while creditors knock at the door is disabling and may even destroy those relationships. In these two cases and more broadly across the south (in others I will describe), the debt conundrum juxtaposes apparently unlike sets of values. Cherished and non-commodified family relations, on the one hand, both induce and are subject to the inexorable force of commodified payment-plus-interest on the other.’[1]

(4) What was different about the second paragraph?

(5) What made the author’s writing clearer? (Hints: shorter sentence length, fewer dependent clauses, use of the active voice, punctuation, less repetition, more direct word choice.) 

[1] James, D. 2021. Life and debt: A view from the south. Economy and Society 50, 38. 

Academic Writing guide from the University of Reading, including definitions of parts of speech and general rules for structuring sentences and paragraphs.

Guidance on grammar and punctuation, including ‘common confusions’, from the University of Bristol.

Academic Phrasebank, a database of phrases used in academic writing (to signal transitions, introduce topics, compare and contrast, etc), from the University of Manchester.