: 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:

@Annie587

For an academic paper, the real criteria is, What does the instructor require?

This is closely related to, What sort of "academic paper"?

If you're writing a term paper for chemistry class, I think flights of poetic oratory would be frowned on, no matter how beautifully they are worded.

If you're writing a poem for a creative writing class, I would be surprised if the instructor insisted on strict grammatical correctness.

In real life, we expect poetry to often deviate from strict grammar. Poetry often puts rhyme and rhythm and "style" (for want of a better word) above strict grammar.

But for a scientific paper, the purpose is to clearly convey facts. If I was grading a paper for a programming class, I don't want to read flights of oratory about how you were overcome by the pristine beauty of the C programming language. I want to see that you understand how to manipulate a hash table or whatever the assignment was.

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