Three different types of academic texts written by advanced learners of
English were analysed to discover whether they differed from each other
in terms of syntactic and lexical complexity. The writing tasks differed
in formality and personal involvement. The results were in accordance
with earlier studies on L2 writing, in that the most formal texts, the
MA thesis conclusions, did not contain any more subordination than the
less formal texts. By the same token, the thesis texts showed the
longest clauses in the data, suggesting a strong reliance on complex
phrases. Another feature previously discovered to characterize formal
academic L2 writing, the proportion of general academic vocabulary, was
also found in the present study to differentiate the formal thesis texts
from the less formal text types.