Abstract:
Over the last decade, Sri Lankan academics and professionals have shown an increased
interest in doing small scale research nationally and regionally. There have been many
journals and research conferences in the English medium initiated by the Sri Lankan
Universities and professional organizations and societies. They encourage publication
and presentation for financial, professional, and humanitarian benefits. Many write the
findings of their research and submit. However, apart from the quality and quantity of
the research papers, the Academic English quality used in the papers still lacks mastery
and fine-tuning. The style of Academic English needs improvement to meet
international standards. Mostly it is one of the factors demoting the publications and
presentations in the indexed and international journals and conferences. A linguistic
approach called stylistic analysis uses the extracted texts of the papers published in
business management and finance in the national universities’ conferences in 2019 and
2020 to describe and explain the features and expressions which are not academically
standard and suggest appropriate alternatives. It is qualitative. These findings show the
implications of wordiness overall. It exemplifies the wrong or low standard academic
writing practices in preposition use, punctuation in complex and compound sentences
and sentence adverb punctuation, verb-preposition, verb-noun combination in
hypothesis formulation, word use, word relations within a sentence, active and passive
voice use, diversity in using the types of clauses and phrases, nominalization vs
verbalization, adverb and adverbial phrases and clauses, linking words, and diversity in
academic vocabulary. Thus this paper creates awareness of efficient and effective
Academic English practices in drafting the research papers to meet the standard
nationally and internationally.
