Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is there a standard practice in academic writing regarding the use of accented letters when the underlying language is English? I'm specifically thinking of the word naive, which often has a dieresis above the i, but I suppose this is applicable to other words.
I would prefer to not use them since it's simpler and seems somehow less pretentious to me.
Also, is there is a difference between dissertations and journal articles?
Do you like reading papers with misspelled words, grammar errors, uncertain syntax, badly formatted equations, unreadable graphs and unclear pictures? Probably not.
Modern typesetting systems and careful proofreading allow writers to avoid, as much as possible, the above unpleasantnesses and, moreover, allow them to typeset all sort of characters. Furthermore, macros and shortcuts can be defined for quickly repeating difficult words. Thus, with modern typesetting systems there's really no excuse for not using diacritical marks, regardless of practices which date back to an epoch when typesetting systems were not as flexible as modern ones.
Academic papers and books are not only read by native English speakers, but by people from all over the world, where a missing accent can be cause of confusion or, in case of many missing accents, considered a sign of sloppiness (which typically does not put the reader in a favourable mood), especially if the accent is missing from a proper name.
I personally always use them, mostly since my last name includes a dieresis, but most style guides only tell you to be consistent: either always use them, or never use them. Like Chris pointed out in his comment: consistency means consistency for each word. There have been some answers that point out that names should always be spelled with whatever accents marks the person uses. To do otherwise would be disrespectful. For other words it's up to you.
You should follow the conventions of the style guide for the journal/publisher you're writing for. A general pattern is that words which have been fully borrowed and assimilated into English as ordinary vocabulary (such as "naive") tend to lose their diacritics, whereas words or phrases that are still considered foreign, flowery, or restricted to specialized use (e.g., détente, fin de siècle) tend to keep them. The place where you would most likely keep them is in proper nouns (especially names of people).
Not having enough reputation for comments, I'll add my perspective on the topic with an answer.
There are words that have more than one accepted usage, such as naive/naïve or a la carte/à la carte, where accepted means these are actually alternative spellings and are shown in dictionaries. Here is a list of English words with diacritics; some of these words have alternative spellings.
However, while in some languages it may be acceptable to replace diacritics by a version without, such as the German ö replaced by oe, in other languages certain funny looking characters are not considered diacritics. An example that comes to mind is Finnish, where ä and ö are considered two vowels that also have their place in the alphabet, and not a version of a and o on steroids. As such and as stated here, "replacing them by ae and oe is not acceptable for Finnish".
So my view on the subject is to use them unless you're unable to; and I can't see why you would be unable to do so nowadays. I don't mind naive because it is still correct (and a widely used alternative spelling); Jyvaeskylae instead of Jyväskylä on the other hand, would just tell me you either do not know the correct spelling or are plain lazy.
a la carte has a different meaning because a is a verb. It is sometimes cited as an alternative form, I just find it lazy, that accent being represented on all English keyboards.
"a" is not a verb in English, that's not really relevant since the locution is not English but French. a is a verb form and à is a preposition. Using one for the other changes the signification. a la carte means (he) has the card/menu which makes little sense.
The question you need to answer is what purpose the accent serves. Traditionally, in English and related languages, the accents have three purposes: to change pronunciation (for instance, the cedilla in the word soupçon causes the c to be pronounced like an s, not a k), to distinguish between homophones (as in French, between a, which means "have", and à, which means "at"), and to mark a change in historical spelling (the circumflex often indicates an s that has been lost to history, as in the French word hôpital, which used to be hospital).
My answer would be that an accent that shows a change in pronunciation (especially acute accents and diaereses) should be retained in formal writing, because we cannot know who will read it, and the reader may need these pronunciation aids; the same argument could be made for homophone distinctions, particularly in poetry.
However, if the accent marks a spelling change, it would depend on when the change occurred: there is no reason to continue to mark a spelling change that occurred before the word entered the English language. If the accent exists, for instance, on the French word, like contrôle, and it shows a letter was omitted long before the word was borrowed into English, then there is no reason to continue to mark the missing letter that was never part of the English spelling. There is, for instance, no mention on Oxford Dictionaries on-line of the spelling hôtel in English. The older word hostel came into the language in the middle ages, and is still spelled thus. The newer form hotel arrived in the mid-seventeenth century, when its French form was already spelled with a circumflex, and the two words were used differently. Hence, it is pointless to write hôtel; these are two separate words, not a change to an older form in English.
On the other hard, there are some newer conventions that are equally acceptable. The older spelling coöperate had already been completely lost by the time I learned to spell, twenty-five years ago, having been replaced by co-operate, which seems to do the same job, and so is perfectly reasonable. These days, cooperate seems to be quite common, and of course, there are no language police to say that it ought not be so; however, in formal writing, I still use the hyphen (as in e-mail; remember when there was still a hyphen there? And that was an originally English word! **And yes, it is okay to begin a sentence with the word "and"; your English teacher only said no because all young school children do it far to much).
It would be very hard to be consistent with the two dots, for example if you use it in naïve, you should probably use in coöperate, reënter, etc.
The diaeresis forbids to join in speech sounds of two vowels - it gives a hint to the reader not to read cooperate as in Cooper, or reenter as in reel
Sometimes we see them separated explicitly co-operation, re-enter, but since naive, cooperation, and reenter are very common, special orthographic rules may apply.
I would write:
a..zin a published document is just as "pretentious" as using capitals in a text message or an instant messenging message. It's not something extra that you add to stand out, it's something normal that you keep doing, even though many others might be too lazy.