Leaving out the definitive article in academic writing

Question

I'm currently finishing up my bachelors' thesis and I'm experimenting with the abstract. I checked my first draft with Grammarly and right away some words were underlined that Grammarly felt were missing the definitive article 'the'. Some examples ( __ means 'the' is missing):

Through __ introduction of roles and contexts, the behavior of objects can be adapted at run-time via addition or modification of attributes and methods.

Recent research has found a remedy inspired by polymorphic inline caches, allowing reuse of so-called dispatch plans which encode the steps directly required for __ execution of adaptations.

I thought that in academic writing leaving out 'the' to sound more concise is accepted? By the way, I am not a native speaker and my University is in a non-English speaking country.

Answer 1

In these cases I would add 'the'.

However, Grammarly is a software program. It is limited in its ability to analyse sentences. I ignore most of its suggestions because I know it is wrong (or doesn't follow my style guide). I am confident about that because I was a secondary English teacher for over three decades.

You might want to consider using other writing checkers. The three I use (other than Grammarly) are ProWritingAid, Language Tool and Hemingway. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Answer 2

You should not omit a definite article merely to "sound more concise". In some cases the presence or absence of the article changes the meaning. In some cases, it is required by traditional formal grammar, although informal English now omits it. An academic publication, particularly a thesis should use relatively formal grammar and style.

In your two examples, I would use "the" in the first. The second could in my view tip either way, but I would incline to omitting "the". although it would be IMO fine to include it. But I agree with S. Mitchell that no software program yet has the level of nuanced analysis to consistently make such decisions correctly.