What Reporting Verbs Do
Reporting verbs are the verbs you use to introduce what another author said, found, or argued — words such as states, suggests, argues, demonstrates, claims, and proposes. In a Malaysian postgraduate literature review, these verbs do more analytical work than most writers realise. The reporting verb you choose signals your stance towards the source: whether you accept the finding, treat it cautiously, or distance yourself from a claim you intend to challenge. Writing “Tan (2021) demonstrated that…” commits you to the strength of that evidence, whereas “Tan (2021) claimed that…” quietly signals doubt. Using reporting verbs deliberately turns a descriptive review into an evaluative one.
Choosing the Right Reporting Verb
Reporting verbs fall into rough categories of strength and function. Neutral verbs — states, notes, describes, reports — simply attribute a point without evaluation. Strong verbs — demonstrates, establishes, confirms — indicate that you accept the evidence as convincing. Tentative verbs — suggests, indicates, implies — fit findings that are plausible but not definitive. Argumentative verbs — argues, contends, maintains — signal that the source is making a contestable claim rather than reporting a fact. Match the verb to what the source actually did: a study that ran an experiment and found a clear effect demonstrated something, while a conceptual paper offering an interpretation argued or proposed it. Calling a small exploratory study’s tentative result something it “proved” misrepresents the evidence, and an examiner will notice.
Varying Reporting Verbs Across Your Literature Review
Many Malaysian theses lean on “states” and “mentions” for every single source, which flattens the review into a list and hides your evaluation of the literature. As you revise, scan each citation and ask what the author was really doing — finding, proposing, criticising, comparing — then select a verb that captures it. A paragraph that moves from “Lim (2019) observed” to “Rahman (2020) challenged this” to “Wong (2022) reconciled the two positions” reads as a genuine scholarly conversation rather than a sequence of disconnected summaries. Keep tense consistent with APA convention: use past tense or present perfect for reporting completed research. It also helps to retire the casual verbs that creep into draft writing — “talks about”, “says”, and “tells us” read as conversational rather than scholarly, and an examiner notices the register slip even when the point itself is sound. Building a working list of fifteen to twenty reporting verbs, sorted by strength, and choosing among them deliberately is one of the fastest ways to make a literature review sound analytical rather than mechanical, and it forces you to decide what you actually think of each source you cite.
