School

How Is Academic Writing Different From Other Types Of Writing?


business woman, writer, retirement

You have probably heard about academic writing but do not know what it is precisely and what its differences from other types are. Let’s figure it out. At first, there are such types of writing as literary (novels, short stories, and other fiction), technical writing (starting from technical discipline textbooks and finishing with different devices instructions), and many others, including academic writing. Technically, academic writing includes all scholarly works, starting from essays written by students and finishing with doctoral dissertations. In the current article, we will consider academic writing as an example of a classical academic essay or article because they represent this style of writing in the best way. So, what are their typical features and the main differences in academic writing?

The language of academic writing

One of the main specifics of academic writing and the main issues of college and university students in Canada who try to cope with an assignment that requires such a style of writing is language. It must be 

  • Formal
  • Precise
  • Complex 

The formality is possibly the easiest feature of academic writing to explain. At first, it meant forbidding the use of first-person pronouns (I, we, us, and others). For example, open any article in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal, and you will see that the authors of the research do not use “I” or “we,” even though they conducted experiments themselves. More frequently, they use something like “the research was conducted…” or “with the results of the study one can see.” Second, academic writing does not allow the use of English slang, short forms (don’t, haven’t, and so on), and simple words (forget about easy and difficult, good and bad, if only it is not about the common good in a few fields where this term is used).

As far as academic writing is used for papers that ought to be scientific contributions to the various areas, it requires precision and operating with facts. This means two things. First, you must have a clear idea that you express in your paper. The second is that you must not express some general notion or refer to abstract sources. If you write “an expert has noted,” you must provide the name of the expert, references to the source, and the number of pages when the notion takes place. 

When you are explaining something to your friend or get an explanation from someone, you will probably prefer to use simple and clear language. However, the difference in academic writing is that it welcomes complexity and the use of terms. The last one represents your knowledge and understanding of the material. In addition, as was already mentioned, simple language is forbidden in academic writing.

Author's Writing Pen

The structure of academic writing

The next specifics of this type of writing is its requirements to the structure. It is important to remember that this type of writing offers the structure of a particular paper, depending on its type (research, review, essay, or something else), but even for a paragraph. Let’s take a closer look at these requirements.

The structure of an academic writing work requires three main parts with very rare exceptions. It must have an introduction, body, and conclusion. The academic research article also might have such a part as an abstract (short description of the main part of the whole work), and its body can be separated into several parts with subtitles, depending on the scientific field and type of the study. 

However, common academic essays written by students mainly do not have subtitles, and parts of them are just different paragraphs. The introduction is the first one, and the conclusion is the last one. The body can have different numbers of paragraphs, depending on the overall length of the work. The most classical is a structure with one introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

The structure of introductions requires a hook (the first sentence that attracts attention), a background of the issue, and a thesis statement (the main idea of the essay, usually in one sentence). The conclusion includes the restatement of the thesis statement (the same again but in other words), a summary of the main points of the paper, and some view on the further development of studying of the problem.

The classical body paragraphs in academic writing have an even more strict structure. It starts with a topic sentence, which represents the main idea of the paragraph, continues with supporting sentences to develop the thought; after that, you must provide evidence (quotation or paraphrase from the credible source), explanation of its importance for the context, and end with a conclusion sentence.

Hand writing in notebook

Evidence in academic writing

You can see that a few times above, we have mentioned the importance of preciseness in academic writing and the significance of quotations or paraphrases needed to support the statements in work. This topic is significant for academic writing and requires additional attention.

At first, you might hear that in the different types of papers, when a writer wants to pursue someone, he or she can use such things as logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is appealing to logic, pathos —to emotions, and ethos—to authority. It is important to remember that if you want to write an academic paper, you cannot appeal to emotions. Only to logic or authority. Your own authority is represented with your name, educational facility, and degree. The authorities of others you use with the references for your work.

What is more, a professional who is writing in an academic style most often must not only provide references to support the idea of the work. It is proper and often even required to make in the papers the literature reviews to represent the previous investigations about the topic.

Including quotations or paraphrasing and doing literature review also requires writers to be familiar with various citation styles. They can depend on the field of science and sometimes even on the particular educational facility. For one, it can be hard to cope with all details of the citation style, and due to that, people often use online essay writing services such as https://ca.customwritings.com. Such companies allow you to get assistance to order personalized, original custom paper of high quality, written from scratch. Many students from Canada have become accustomed to custom writing companies, to buy cheap but top academic writing papers that can be used as examples for further work.

Essay Writing Study

Now you know about the key differences and main specifics of academic writing. We hope that this article provides you with some help in your future work related to this complex writing style. It includes many rules and requirements, but they become something natural and easy with practice. In the case you have some issues with academic writing, remember, you are free to become a customer of an online service which will help you to cope with academic writing difficulties.


Even More Stories You May Like (courtesy of Google)




Comments are closed.