What is academic writing in simple words?

Academic writing is clear, concise, focused, structured and supported by evidence. Its purpose is to help the reader's understanding. It has a formal tone and style, but it is not complex and does not require the use of long sentences or complicated vocabulary. In other words, the emphasis is placed on arguments and information, rather than on the author.

As a result, academic writing tends to use nouns and noun phrases rather than verbs and adverbs. It also tends to use more passive structures, rather than active voice, for example Water was heated instead of I heated it. Specialized language or jargon is common and often necessary in academic writing, which is usually addressed to an audience of other scholars in related fields. Examples of other academic conventions to follow include proper use of titles and subtitles, spelling acronyms correctly when used for the first time in text, avoiding jargon or colloquial language, avoiding emotive language or unsupported declarative statements, avoiding contractions, and using pronouns first person and second person only when necessary.

A significant difference between academic writing and other types of writing is the use of citations and references by published authors. Compared to everyday writing, academic writing tends to be more formal, dense, abstract, objective, rigorous and very united. This page considers what academic writing is, analyzes in detail the main characteristics of academic writing and suggests ways to develop academic writing. While this is not an exhaustive list of all the possible forms that academic writing can take, it does contain the most common types.

In academic writing, the author is expected to investigate the research problem from an authoritarian point of view. It is what students are expected to produce for classes and what academic professors and researchers use to write academic materials. As noted above, all research, evidence and arguments can be questioned, and it is important for the academic writer to show his stance on a particular topic, in other words, how strong his claims are. The development of academic writing experience is a long and challenging process that can take many years and involves constant mental and emotional struggles.

Fang describes the key genres of academic writing, the common rhetorical movements associated with each genre, the essential skills needed to write genres, and the language resources and strategies that are functional and effective to realize these movements and skills. In this blog, Zhihui Fang, author of Demystifying Academic Writing, discusses what academic writing is, why it matters, as well as essential skills for academic writing. Abstracts appear in the search results of the academic database so that readers can quickly determine if the article is relevant to their own research. Academic writing is arguably the most important skill in academic contexts, since writing is the main method of academic communication.

Keep in mind that a problem statement without the research questions does not qualify as academic writing because simply identifying the research problem does not establish for the reader how it will contribute to solving the problem, what aspects they think are most critical, or suggest a method for collecting data. to better understand the problem. Critical writing requires a great deal of research for the writer to develop a deep enough understanding of the subject to be truly critical about it.