Or: what happens when a boardroom becomes a legal panel
Most academic English advice is written for essays and exams. It rarely covers what happens when the audience isn’t a marker but a panel, and the format isn’t a written answer but a live, adversarial defence of your own work. I tutored Master’s candidates at the IMO International Maritime Law Institute at the University of Malta, and the language demands there are distinct enough from ordinary academic English to be worth their own treatment.
Hedging that doesn’t sound like uncertainty. Academic English relies heavily on hedged claims, ‘the data suggests,’ ‘this appears to indicate,’ rather than blunt assertions like ‘this proves.’ For C1+ speakers, this is genuinely hard to get right, because the instinct is either to over-hedge until every sentence sounds tentative, or to drop hedging entirely and sound overconfident in a context that specifically punishes overconfidence. The actual skill is calibrated hedging: committing clearly to your own argument while leaving appropriate room around claims the evidence doesn’t fully support. ‘The evidence strongly suggests’ is a stronger, more defensible position than either ‘this proves’ or ‘this might possibly indicate,’ and knowing which register to reach for, sentence by sentence, is a specific, learnable skill rather than a vague sense of academic tone.
The viva voce is a different genre from the essay. A written thesis gets one chance to make its case, calmly, on the page. A viva, an oral defence in front of a panel, is adversarial by design: examiners are trained to probe weak points, ask follow-up questions that weren’t anticipated, and see how the candidate handles genuine pushback in real time, not just whether they know the material. This means academic English on its own isn’t sufficient preparation. What’s actually needed is the ability to hold a hedged, precise position under live cross-examination, without either collapsing into agreement to avoid conflict or becoming defensive in a way that reads as weak scholarship rather than strong conviction.
Handling aggressive questions without losing register. A sharp, sceptical question from a panel member is not an attack to be defended against emotionally, it’s an invitation to demonstrate the strength of your position. The register that works best treats the challenge as legitimate (‘that’s a fair challenge to the methodology, and here’s why I still think the conclusion holds’) rather than either capitulating immediately or getting visibly defensive. This is a genuinely distinct skill from writing a strong paragraph, it’s holding your own argument, calmly and precisely, while someone is actively trying to find its weakest point in real time.
Why this matters beyond maritime law specifically. Any C1+ professional defending research, a proposal, or a strategic recommendation in front of a genuinely sceptical audience, a board, a review panel, a client pushing back hard, faces a version of this same demand. The academic viva is just the clearest, highest-stakes version of a skill that shows up constantly in professional life: holding a precise, hedged position under real, live challenge.
I’ve built a companion lesson plan for this one: a calibrated-hedging scale, a challenge-and-hold roleplay, and a phrase bank for acknowledging a sharp question without capitulating. Download the Precision Under Cross-Examination lesson plan (PDF).