Academic Writing: Challenge or Curse?

by Dr Ken Hyland, former Associate Professor, Department of English and Communication

Few writers, whether novice graduate student or experienced professor, find writing easy. It is perfectly normal to feel daunted, and even panic-stricken, when faced with an academic writing task and these feelings never quite disappear. Students often think that the ability to write well involves luck, or some inherent genius, but this is not true. Like any other art or creative act it takes time and plenty of reworking to get it right. It helps if you know something about what you are doing and where you are going, which means having understanding of both the process and products of writing. 

What is academic writing?

The term covers a range of different types of writing (or genres) each with its own conventions and features. For example, research articles, theses, grant proposals, textbooks, book reviews, and lab reports all have different purposes and are organised differently to achieve those purposes. The ways we structure our arguments, the certainty with which we make our claims, the emphasis we give to our personal opinions, and the style we use to address our readers, are likely to be very different in each of these.

Academic writing is also quite diverse when we look at different disciplines: a research article in biology diverges from one in engineering, and a textbook in law differs from one in sociology. Reading these texts, we quickly notice that more than content and jargon are different. We see that writers in different fields talk to their readers in different ways, drawing on the previous literature differently, representing themselves differently, and establishing what they want to be accepted differently. We write with a supervisor or colleagues from our discipline in mind.

General principles

This doesn't mean that we can't identify some general principles of academic writing. There are overlaps of style, organisation and presentation between genres and disciplines which we think of as academic writing. In good academic writing the writer shows a strong sense of purpose and an appropriate voice. Both come from knowing who your audience is and what it expects from the paper.

Sense of purpose

This suggests that the writer has a clear direction and that there is an overall coherence to the writing. This is partly achieved by control over the material, knowing the literature, what is relevant, how ideas are related to each other, and by carefully structuring the argument in a way that is expected and clearly signalling the steps in the process. In a research-based genre this usually involves an introduction which informs the reader of the topic, its importance, and how it fits in with the interests and problems of the discipline by reviewing your literature in the introduction. In most disciplines you then have to give the method you will use to address this topic and answer the questions you have raised about it. You then present the findings that these methods produce and analyse their relevance and importance in a discussion. These stages are different for different kinds of writing so it is a good idea to do a lot of reading and become familiar with the kind of format expected.

Appropriate voice

The way we express our ideas helps determine whether they are likely to be accepted or not. Not everyone will always agree with what you have to say but even hard to swallow ideas can be made more acceptable by sounding intelligent and reasonable. To persuade a reader, we need to sound confident in what we say, but also reasonable, open-minded and respectful of others' points of view. Again, this means knowing what your readers are likely to expect and accept, and fitting your language to show your personal honesty and professional competence.

The process of writing

Often students' problems with academic writing are increased by their lack of experience in organising how they write. They tend to delay writing until they have all the data they need, start at the beginning, write through to the end, leave their revisions until the paper is finished, and expect to get their paper right first time. This is the hard way.

Everything we know about writing tells us that while every individual has a preferred way of writing, there are certain points that apply to most of us. These are:

• Writing is recursive and not linear: writers start at any point they please and constantly revise and redraft as they write.
• Writing generates thinking: looking at our writing generates new ideas and new ways of organising and expressing our ideas; thinking and writing go together.
• Writing is social: we always write for a particular audience and build into our writing what we know about its opinions, preferred ways of arguing, background knowledge, etc.
• Writing is purposive: our purpose needs to be clear and explicit from the beginning.
• Writing is strategic: we write for a particular discipline and goal; therefore it is a good idea to get advice from others and to consult examples of the genre (and journal) we are writing.

What I have tried to show in this short article is that academic writing is a challenge that can be met, rather than a curse to avoid. Writing an effective and successful dissertation, grant proposal or research paper does not have to involve painful trial and error as there are ways to shortcut this process. In addition to the research which we put into our papers, we need to do a little more research on how to present them. Knowing something about the process of writing, the conventional voice and format of the product in our disciplines, and the audience we are writing for can help us approach writing tasks with greater confidence of success.