42 cards covering hedging language, transitions, analytical verbs, and formal register. Click a card to reveal the definition and example.
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Academic writing is not ordinary writing with longer words substituted in. Swapping “use” for “utilise” makes a sentence heavier without making it more precise, and markers notice. What actually distinguishes academic register is precision about how strongly you are claiming something and what kind of relationship you are asserting between ideas.
That is why the vocabulary here is grouped by function rather than alphabetically. Hedging phrases let you calibrate confidence. Analytical verbs name what a source is doing — arguing, conceding, demonstrating, assuming. Transitions signal whether the next sentence extends, qualifies or contradicts the last. Each group does a job no synonym can do.
Hedging is the most misunderstood part of academic style. Students often read it as vagueness or weakness, and strip it out to sound more confident. The opposite is true: an unhedged claim you cannot fully support is a claim a marker can dismantle, while a precisely hedged one is defensible.
“This proves that…” commits you to certainty. “This suggests that…”, “the evidence is consistent with…”, and “it appears likely that…” each stake out a different, weaker, and often more honest position. Choosing the right one is an act of judgement about your evidence — which is exactly what is being assessed.
Vocabulary you have merely read is vocabulary you will recognise but not produce. Under time pressure in an exam or a late draft, you write with the words that come to mind unprompted, which means recognition is not enough — the phrases have to be retrievable.
Reviewing them as cards forces retrieval, and spacing the reviews is what makes them stick. The same logic applies to any material with a short checkable answer; the spaced repetition course covers the scheduling, and the flashcard maker handles decks of your own.
A phrase you have just learned tends to arrive in your writing slightly oversized — used where a plainer word would do, or stretched to cover a meaning it does not quite have. Markers notice this more readily than students expect, because the register jumps mid-paragraph.
The reliable way to avoid it is to meet each phrase in context before using it. When you read a paper, notice what the author is doing when they write “this would appear to suggest” rather than “this shows” — usually hedging a finding they cannot fully support. Vocabulary learned from real academic prose comes with its usage conditions attached; vocabulary learned from a list does not.
