~ Characteristics of academic writing include a formal tone, use of a third-person rather than first-person perspective, a clear focus on the research problem being studied, and precise word choice. Like specialized languages adopted in other professions, such as law or medicine, academic writing is designed to convey agreement. All you have to do is open a thesaurus to find synonyms for a particular word only to realize that some of those words do NOT have the tone you are looking for. Some are obviously negative. Some are positive. And the rest is more or less neutral. Related: Adjectives to describe a person. The keyword you need right now is: