The language of Academic Essays – Hedging devices and more

Look at the hedging devices used below.

Recommend Suggest Propose Feel Believe

In Academic IELTS writing these reporting verbs can be used to

to show caution (that my ideas might be disproved)
to speculate about a reason, cause, result or theory
to present ideas in a manner that invites discussion.

Although tone is not assessed directly in the IELTS Band Scores, using the incorrect tone can seriously affect the cohesion of your writing.

Arguing too strongly can change the nature of your writing and this can lead to a negative opinion of your balanced writing for an IELTS Essay.

To overcome this, and engage the IELTS examiner in your essay.

Use words that shows caution, speculate and present ideas effectively in a neutral tome.

In other words and depending in the IELTS questions, use hedging and hedging devices to enage your reader.

Other ways of Hedging in English

Examples

Examples of Hedging and Cautious sentences

To illustrate further this look at these examples and answer these questions.

Which sentences are very strong in their opinion.

Which are more neutral?

Which sentences make a suggestion?

Which are cautious statements?

* You are free to differ with my interpretation of the answers 🙂 *

You can see that some sentences use verbs, modal verbs and even nouns to hedge an idea (make an idea less forceful, cautious and more neutral in tone)

Now try these hedging exercises.

Hedging Examples

Conclusions

I hope that from these very short activities you can see there are better ways of presenting a stance or position in an IELTS Task 2 Essay.

Above all, when I read a very strongly worded piece of writing, sadly I am naturally more critical of other elements such as ideas, coherence and cohesion among other things.

Take this on board and try to introduce more cautious language into your IELTS preparation and see if your teacher notices a positive improvement in your writing. 🙂

I’m Jonathan

I’ve taught IELTS and University English in more than a dozen universities and schools around the world.

I’m a parent, traveller and passionate about language teaching and helping students achieve their dreams.

Whilst living in Austria or working in Asia, I run IELTS courses to help students get to where they want to be.

If you are serious about IELTS, connect with me to see how I can help you.