Academic writing is often referred to as formal, but the construct of formality is yet to be clearly defined. To some scholars (e.g., Kolln & Gray, 2017), formality refers to the presence or absence of certain linguistic features in a text. To others (e.g., Smith, 2019), it refers to situational characteristics of a text (e.g., research articles are formal because of their target audience and purpose). 

The goal of this study is to explore the elusive construct of formality in the context of academic writing. We asked instructors of first-year composition courses to rate the level of formality in 60 short texts on a five-point scale. The texts were from two publication types (university textbooks, journal articles) in three disciplines (psychology, biology, history). We used instructors’ perceptions to (a) identify relationships between perceptions of formality and the use of linguistic features in academic texts, and (b) determine the extent to which the situational characteristics of texts (e.g., differences in audience, purpose) are related to perceptions of formality. To investigate the linguistic features that are associated with more formal texts, we used Multi-Dimensional analysis to reduce 56 lexico-grammatical features to five dimensions of linguistic variation and correlated those dimension scores with instructor’s perceptions. 

Preliminary analysis indicates that texts perceived to be more formal included more linguistic features that help package information such as pre-nominal modifiers, nouns, and agentless passive voice (r = .58). Texts that were considered to be less formal included more of the linguistic features associated with colloquial narrative such as phrasal verbs, past tense verbs, and activity verbs (r = -.50). Additionally, differences in publication types explained 55% of the variance in perceptions of formality. These findings can inform how formality is taught and assessed, contributing to equity in the assessment of student writing.