5 Tips Every Student Should Know About Academic Writing
Academic writing is a formal as well as structural style of writing. This style of writing is used in universities and scholarly publications. Moreover, this writing style is recommended to students for, essays, thesis/dissertations, research papers or proposals, etc. Academic writing requires multiple requirements to be fulfilled:
● Formal and unbiased
● Clear and precise
● Focused and well-structured
● Well sourced
● Correct and consistent
It is mostly difficult for students to keep an eye on all these things during their writing. To help them out, we are going to explain five tips every student should know about academic writing. These tips will make it easier to do competent writing.
1. Write in a formal Tone
In academic writing, as a student, you are required to write in an objective and formal tone. You can’t express ideas in an emotional, conversational, or biased tone. In academics, you should make sure that all the claims or arguments made have correct suppose of pieces of evidence. You can’t add personal experiences or opinions. However, if their views or opinions are backed with empirical data, it is allowed to include them. In this scenario, writing formally can become a hard nut to crack for some students who are not proficient or familiar with it. This may cause hesitation for them to write. To deal with this you are required to practice a lot and learn this tone from mentors or seniors. It is itself a time-consuming task. The easiest and the most efficient way of learning and writing formal tone is from online tools. There are a number of rephrasing tools that can rephrase online your work in a formal tone. You just have to set the tool at a “Formal or Academic” tone and run. The tools will automatically create an output with an academic/formal style. As shown in the following demonstration;
2. Be Direct And Concise
While writing academic work, students should use words to express not to impress. This is because in formal writing you are required to complete complex topics within a small word count.
Here are some tips to be followed for writing clearly and concisely;
● You should skip additional or supplementary details.
● Make your writing straightforward and simple to read. You should avoid vague or complex language but express everything in a manner that is easier to get.
● Give your writing a power of brevity by going to the point. So, you should avoid flowery wording and overstatement but be focused on facts. And so on…
3. Verify Your Work Is Plagiarism Free
Students are mostly abused by plagiarism. After research conducted by an institute, it is reported that 58% of students have been indulging in plagiarised work. Plagiarism can result in worse outcomes for your academic work;
● Loss of Credibility.
● Negative impact on your reputation.
● Struck off from the university or college.
●So, it is essential to make sure your writing is unique and original (even if it has accidental plagiarism). Here are some useful tips regarding plagiarism;
● You should not use the words of others. But, you should restate them in your own words to make them use in a unique manner.
● If you copy or directly use the wording or saying of someone it is necessary to close it between quotation marks. For Example:
“Life goes wasting for those who don’t struggle and take risks”.
● In the case of using research or studies of other sources, it is necessary to cite them correctly.
For online sources: the title of the page, the name of the author, the date of publication, and the “URL” are required in the citation.
However, For Books: The name of the book, the author of the book, and the page number are required in the citation.
4. Maintain Access to Your Research Notes
In academic writing, students are required to prove their claims or arguments with supporting data/sources. So, here in academic writing, you’re not allowed to express your arguments
and go over them without providing proof for what you said (is true). So, for this, you have to go through a bulk of research papers related to your work and use their findings to back your points. The problem that mostly occurs here is that the students lose track of their supporting sources and forget which research paper contradicts their
claims. To help you out in this step we have covered some tips;
● You should keep a record of all the research papers.
● Write all the key points extracted from different papers in a notebook.
● You should record all the page numbers that have facts or details that you may need to broach or refer to.
● Keep all the records along when you start writing. This will remove the hassle of researching papers again.
5. Proofread At the End
After crafting your first draft of academic work it is essential to proofread it in order to make it error-free and increase clarity. Following are some tips to proofread;
● Ensure that a formal tone is maintained throughout the writing.
● Make sure all the outlines you created are covered in the content.
● You should check the spelling as well as punctuation errors in the work and remove them. This is because they may result in confusion.
● You should check readability by paying attention to every word choice, sentence length, sentence structure, and paragraph transition.
● Academic does not tolerate grammatical mistakes. This is because they may result in misunderstanding. So, you should analyze your writing for grammatical mistakes and fix them.
Conclusion
Academic writing is a well-known style in universities and colleges. Students are required to write in an academic tone throughout their studying journey. So, it is important for them to have a strong grip on their writing skill to get their work approved and attain brilliant grades. In the above post, we unfolded five helpful tips every student should know for academic writing. We hope our interpreted tip will prove helpful in improving your writing.
