What is Academic Writing? (and Other Burning Questions About It)
In this blog Zhihui Fang, author of Demystifying Academic Writing, discusses what academic writing is, why it’s important as well as essential skills for academic writing.
What is academic writing?
Simply put, academic writing is the writing done for academic purposes. It is entering into a conversation with others, but the way this conversation is carried out differs from how everyday conversation unfolds. Yes, academic writing involves expressing your ideas, but those ideas need to be presented as a response to some other person or group; and they also need to be carefully elaborated, well supported, logically sequenced, rigorously reasoned, and tightly stitched together.
There is more than one kind of academic writing. In academic settings, we write for many different purposes. We write reading responses, book reviews, argumentative essays, literature reviews, empirical research articles, grant proposals, conference abstracts, commentaries, memoranda, and many other text types. Each of these types of academic writing has its own purpose, organizational structure, and linguistic features.
Why is academic writing important?
Academic writing is a means of producing, codifying, transmitting, evaluating, renovating, teaching, and learning knowledge and ideology in academic disciplines. Being able to write in an academic style is essential to disciplinary learning and critical for academic success. Control over academic writing gives you capital, power, and agency in knowledge building, identify formation, disciplinary practices, social positioning, and career advancement.
What makes academic writing ‘academic’ and challenging?
Compared to everyday writing, academic writing tends to be more formal, dense, abstract, objective, rigorous, and tightly knit.
Formality. Academic writing uses a unique set of grammatical devices that helps the author achieve precision and informativity, avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation, and establish authority and credibility.
Abstraction. Academic writing deals principally with concepts, ideas, generalizations, and interpretations, instead of concrete individuals or tangible things.
Objectivity. Academic writing foregrounds ideas and arguments and backgrounds the author who presents the ideas or makes the arguments.
Rigor. In academic writing, the author is expected to be meticulous in both word choice and logic of argument. Ideas or arguments are presented with care and then restated, clarified, explained, exemplified, and reasoned
Density. Academic writing uses long noun phrases with multiple modifiers to pack a heavy load of information into the sentence.
Tightly-Knit. Academic writing presents information and develops arguments in a highly structured way. Sentences and paragraphs are woven together to create an information ‘flow’ and a smooth texture within the text.
These six features are interrelated, and together, they are what makes a piece of writing at once ‘academic’ and challenging for academic neophytes.
Why is academic writing important?
Language is not a set of prescriptive rules or grammatical conventions. It is, instead, a creative resource for making meaning. Writers use language by choosing from the grammatical options it provides to present information, develop argument, infuse points of view, incorporate others’ ideas and voices, engage readers, sharpen focus, and organize discourse in a way that realizes their intentions and meets their audience’s needs. One major source of writing struggles for non-native and native English speakers alike is language. In other words, it is unfamiliarity with the grammatical patterns of academic writing, above and beyond a lack of deep knowledge of the topics to be written about, that contributes principally to the difficulties that many students and scholars experience in writing for academic purposes.
What are the essential skills for academic writing?
Academic writing communicates complex ideas in a clear, precise, logical, reasoned, and evidence-based way. It is an advanced literacy task that requires a host of demanding skills. Learning to write for academic purposes involves, for example, learning
how to contextualize your ideas and arguments in the existing scholarship of the field
how to synthesize, summarize, paraphrase, quote, source, and evaluate others’ work
how to define and explain concepts
how to describe things or processes
how to express surprises or counter-expectations
how to classify/categorize and compare/contrast things
how to agree or disagree with others’ points of view
how to provide examples and offer explanations
how to engage with opposing views
how to integrate visual images with the linguistic prose
how to acknowledge limitations and make recommendations
how to express appreciation or make disclaimers, and
how to connect sentences, link paragraphs, and structure discourse
Developing these advanced literacy skills and a repertoire of linguistic resources and strategies that instantiate them is a challenging process that takes time, experience, and support.
How can I improve my academic writing?
Developing expertise in academic writing is a lengthy and challenging process that can take many years and involves constant mental and emotional struggles. It is simply not realistic to expect one to become a good writer overnight, let alone a good writer for academic purposes, by just attending one workshop, taking one course, reading one book, or completing a few sets of exercises. It takes time, effort, awareness, experience, reflection, stamina, and support to become proficient in academic writing. Here are six tips for improving your academic writing:
Foster productive writing habits that work for you
Read deeply within your field and widely in related fields
Develop linguistic awareness and grammatical sensitivity
Persevere through the recursive writing process of planning, outlining, drafting, revising, polishing, and presenting/publishing
Attend to key elements of academic writing, such as audience, purpose, organization, style, clarity, flow, and appearance
Overcome cultural barriers
How do I increase my chances of getting published?
Writing for publication can be a mysterious process that intimidates novice writers and academic neophytes. Developing and honing academic writing skills is key to having a successful publication record. Additional knowledge, skills, and dispositions are needed to increase your chances of getting published. These include
Write about something that you really care and know about
Know the publication outlet you are targeting
Find people of like interest to collaborate with
Be patient and persistent
Simulate dialogues with potential reviewers
Embrace feedback of all kinds to improve writing
The road toward publication may seem long and rough, but you will find that the journey becomes less bumpy the more you have traveled on it.
About the Author
Dr. Zhihui Fang is an Irving & Rose Fien Endowed Professor of Education in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida. His expertise includes language and literacy education, English teacher education, and functional linguistics in education. He is the author of Demystifying Academic Writing: Genres, Moves, Skills, and Strategies (New York: Routledge, 2021) and Using Functional Grammar in English Literacy Teaching and Learning (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2020), among many other publications.
Academic Writing: Practical Tools for International Students
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Academic Writing FreeBook
Writing essays and dissertations can be a significant challenge for many international students studying at English-language universities. To help instructors support their students in this demanding task, we have put together some key chapters from leading titles in the field of Academic Writing for non-native English speakers.
