Politeness Strategies in Academic Writing Among First-Year Students at Usman Dan Fodio University Sokoto

This study examines the politeness strategies deployed in academic writing by first-year students at Usman Dan Fodio University, Sokoto, North West Nigeria. Academic writing competence is a recognised challenge for Nigerian undergraduates entering university, and the linguistic dimension of politeness in written academic English has received limited attention in the Nigerian higher education context. The study is grounded in Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory and employs a textual analysis design. A corpus of 120 first-year essays drawn from the General Studies writing programme was compiled and analysed for hedging devices, impersonal constructions, discourse markers of deference, and face-threatening acts. The analysis identifies patterns of both positive and negative politeness across essay types. Findings reveal that students frequently overuse positive politeness strategies, including first-person solidarity expressions and evaluative endorsement of cited authors, while underusing the hedging and tentative structures expected in academic discourse. Hausa cultural norms of deference are shown to manifest in writing as excessive formality and avoidance of direct critique, which may affect the argumentative quality of essays. The study recommends that academic writing instruction at Nigerian universities address politeness explicitly as a culturally mediated feature of written discourse. Keywords: politeness strategies, academic writing, Brown and Levinson, Sokoto, first-year students.