Lexical Features of Academic Writing

Abstract

In measuring the quality of written text, especially academic writing, lexical features are as important as grammatical features and should not be ignored. The highly computable nature of lexicons can make them a good criterion for determining and measuring the quality of text. In this article three lexical features: lexical density, complexity, and formality are reviewed and justified as measurement tools of academic texts. Furthermore, a measurement method is offered to evaluate lexical complexity level of an academic text.