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Reporting Verbs

In academic writing, you will often make references to the research of others, or secondary sources and will integrate their ideas into your own text. In order to integrate secondary sources coherently into the texts, reporting verbs are used to create a professional writing text. Furthermore, using appropriate reporting verbs can help the writer to achieve the following:

to acknowledge the author’s personal viewpoint
to indicate a writer’s attitude regarding what the author says
to state the author’s viewpoint regarding other literature

USING APPROPRIATE REPORTING VERBS

Essentially, reporting verbs can show your belief of others’ ideas. Your viewpoint of others’ ideas can be divided into three types:

a belief that the literature is correct (stronger position)
a neutral attitude towards the literature (i.e. neither correct nor incorrect – neutral position)
a belief that the literature is incorrect (weaker position)

The following table contains some of the common reporting verbs that you can use to express your belief about the literature in your academic writing text.

Purpose	Weaker Position	Neutral Position	Stronger Position
addition		adds
advice		advises
agreement	admits, concedes	accepts, acknowledges, agrees, concurs, confirms, recognises	applauds, praises, supports
argument/persuasion	apologises	assures, encourages, interprets, justifies, reasons	alerts, argues, contends, convinces, emphasises, exhorts, forbids, insists, proves, promises, persuades, threatens, warns
belief	guesses, hopes, imagines	believes, claims, expresses, feels, holds, knows, maintains, professes	asserts, guarantees, insists, upholds
conclusion		concludes, discovers, finds, infers, realises
disagreement	doubts, questions	challenges, debates, disagrees, questions, requests, wonders	accuses, attacks, complains, contradicts, criticises, denies, discards, disclaims, dismisses, disputes, disregards, negates, opposes, refutes, rejects
discussion	comments	discusses, explores	reasons