How To Learn Academic Writing Skills: A Comprehensive Guide

Academic writing is a formal, organized, and concise form of writing providing factual knowledge backed up by evidence and logic and directed towards a scholarly audience. If you are a student, researcher, or professor in any discipline, you will use academic writing to convey your ideas and thoughts formally. Some typical academic writing examples include research papers, essays, thesis, dissertations, reports, literary analysis, and abstracts. In this article, you will find all the necessary detail to learn about academic writing; its types, features, skills required, and ways to improve your academic writing skills.

TYPES OF ACADEMIC WRITING:

There are four basic types of academic writing; descriptive, analytical, persuasive, and critical. These types are used individually depending upon the requirements. They can be combined such that in a thesis, you would use descriptive as well as analytical writing to present your results and discussions. Learn more about these types here.

FEATURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING:

Academic writing has certain features that make it distinctive from other forms of writing. It is organized, planned, and follows a logical structure. Following are the various features of academic writing.

• USE OF FORMAL VOCABULARY:

You would see a particular focus on the word “formal” in this article. This is because academic work is mainly done in a formal and organized way. Formal vocabulary doesn’t mean the usage of complex language and fancy words. However, it should be different from the casual way of speaking and writing. Here you can find a detailed academic word list.

• PLANNED AND FOCUSED:

You should always plan and formulate an outline before beginning to write. Your work should be focused and centered around your main topic. All the arguments and information presented in the paper should refer to the main idea and topic being discussed.

• THOROUGHLY RESEARCHED AND EVIDENCE-BASED:

In academic writing, you would not present your beliefs and ideas; instead, you need to include factual and evidence-based writing. This would involve doing primary research to collect information through surveys, interviews, questionnaires, etc., or through secondary research that involves using secondary sources such as the internet, books, and archival data.

• LOGICALLY STRUCTURED:

It would help if you structured all academic work logically. Different academic writing types have a different structure, but the common one to follow is an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. All the information presented in your work should be connected with the central idea, following a logical and reasonable approach, conciseness, and clarity in your paper. Moreover, you should avoid using emotive language, opinions, and a subjective approach and present the information from an objective standpoint.

SKILLS REQUIRED FOR ACADEMIC WRITING:

You would be required to develop the following skills for writing doing academic work.

• RESEARCH:

For writing high-quality academic papers, you would need extensive research to get all the required knowledge and information about the topic to be discussed in your paper. You should know the sources from which you can get quality information that may include books, research papers, and journal articles. Having the required knowledge about a topic through extensive research, you would develop your argument, write confidently and in a logical flow.

• TIME MANAGEMENT:

Writing a high-quality academic paper involves various steps such as researching, outlining, writing, and editing your work. For this purpose, you need to acquire the necessary skill of time management through which you would complete your work in time, without having to worry at the last moment. You should ensure to allocate sufficient time for all the writing steps depending upon the length and complexity of your paper.

• CORRECT GRAMMAR AND SPELLING:

In academic writing, grammatical and spelling mistakes cannot be overlooked. Even if you present a valid argument, considering your paper has grammatical and spelling errors, it would not give a good impression and may not get the required attention. Here are some tips on how to improve your grammar skills.

COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID IN ACADEMIC WRITING:

It would be best to avoid the following mistakes in your academic work to make it more presentable and authentic. Additionally, you may want to consider a coursework writing service.

• Using informal language
• Copying someone else’s work and not using proper citations and references
• Repeating words or using long and complex sentences.
• Jumping randomly from one argument to another without a logical pattern

TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR ACADEMIC WRITING SKILLS:

• Write in active voice and avoid using passive voice in your sentences
• Use appropriate punctuation and sentence structure
• Take care of the 5Cs in your writing.
• After writing, always proofread your work to check for errors.

 

About the author:

Grace Griffin is a member of the writer’s Team on ResumeCroc. She has bachelor’s in Law, Masters in Literature, and a PhD in Economics. she wanted to explore all the possible subjects in the world. Still, she is afraid that she couldn’t do so. Grace is a technical writer and writes research-based content. As for her hobbies, she loves reading articles, blogs, magazines, newspapers and books.