: Re: Do academic papers have to be necessarily grammatically correct? I notice that a lot of beautiful literature contains sentences that are not grammatically correct. Here are some examples:

@Murphy332

I don't think the question really makes sense. Grammar is defined among other things "as the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed" and as "an account of these features; a set of rules accounting for these constructions".

In that sense it's a description of the rules that naturally exist in a language, rather than a prescriptive set of rules for people to follow. No description will be 100% accurate.

Since academic papers are usually carefully edited, often by multiple highly educated and prestigious authors and editors, we'd expect them to have relatively few mistakes. Any constructions that they do systematically contain are therefore pretty much grammatical by definition - as is any usage in other language forms when it's systematic enough to be clearly not accidental. Any grammarian writing a general grammar of a language would need to include the way the language is used in academic papers.

Questions about whether specific grammar rules are apply in academic writing would be answerable for specific academic communities, but there is no theoretical 'perfect form of English' against which we can compare academic writing to see if it follows all the same rules.

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