Academic writing is extremely significant in education as it helps to provide better research work in the tenure of your Masters or PHD. Academic writing is possible only if creative and clear ideas come into our minds. If you have strong research skills and understand the importance of your topic, it can help you better in improving your skills of academic writing. This is a guide which will help you understand the importance of academic writing and how you can improve your skills of academic writing. So come on, let’s start the process of good academic writing:
Comprehending the need and purpose of academic writing
First, you need to understand the importance of academic writing and why it is so useful in your education timeline. It is different from other styles of writing as it does not focus on personal opinions rather it focuses on research opinions. To make your academic writing effective, accurate research is needed as it helps to provide well-researched facts and accurate evidence. So therefore you would have to be extremely clear about the focus of the academic writing, that is you want to write a comparison, analysis or you want to provide a solution. Once you are clear about your expectations from the academic writing, it would be easier for you to continue with the process of academic writing.
Planning and Organisation of your thoughts
First, you should organise and plan your thoughts into a proper structure so that you can provide a perfect piece of academic writing to your supervisors. Planning starts with understanding the basic concept or ideas regarding the subject or the topic. After realising the required topic for the academic writing piece, you would have to set the structure of the writing. Your basic structure for the writing should be:
Introduction: In this stage, you introduce the topic of your work and state the purpose of your writing.
Body paragraph: These are the main paragraphs in which the topic is exploded and analysed according to the requirements of the writing.
Conclusion: Concluding your work is extremely important in academic writing as it helps in providing a precise thought to the audience after completing the piece of academic writing.
Establishing a thorough research
In order to start academic writing, accurate research is extremely important to collect relevant information regarding the subject and topic. Start collecting information from the website which is significant academic data. Start collecting research articles and journals from the Google Scholar and different other databases. Gathering information from these articles and reports can help in providing accurate data to complete the research and enhance the principles of academic writing.
Develop a strong thesis statement
Thesis statement is precise and practical and the entire academic writing revolves around the thesis statement. You cannot have a small thesis statement of 4 to 5 words as it is not enough for underlining the main focus and purpose of your academic writing. An effective thesis statement should be of a complete sentence consisting of 20 to 25 words summarising the concept of the academic writing in a single line.
Writing with Precision and clarity
You should focus on writing to the point sentences and not drag away the sentence meaninglessly. Writing long sentences is not a strength for academic writing. A perfect sentence in academic writing should be of 15 to 20 words with clear and accurate meaning. Unnecessarily dragging sentences can negatively impact the accuracy of academic research.
Aligning the writing with accurate evidence
You must align your academic writing with accurate evidence to justify the points written by you. For providing evidence, you must use the collected journals and articles from different databases with referencing the authors from journals and articles. The referencing standards that are followed generally are APA, Harvard, and MLA. These referencing styles are important to provide evidence for the academic writing piece.
Edit and Revise your work
When you are first writing, it is a draft, and after the completion of the draft, you should edit and revise your work. While revising and editing, you must focus on: the content, structure and grammar and referencing.
Formatting and Citation guidelines
Academic papers should always follow a particular formatting and citation guideline whether it is Harvard, MLA, APA, or Chicago. You have to be extremely particular about the titration and formatting guidelines according to the citation guidelines provided by the University you are studying in. Every University has a specific set of citation and format guidelines which needs to be followed while you are completing the academic writing.
Ask for Feedback
After the completion of the academic writing, you must ask for feedback from your supervisors regarding the relevance and accuracy of the academic writing work. It will help you in the future to work on academic writing pieces.