Have you written and edited your own paper? Don’t forget to proof read it.
Academic writing requires critical thinking that contributes to clear and well-defined arguments. Statements must be supported with the reliable evidence either from peer-reviewed scholarly sources, results of a case study/experiment, or quotations from a primary source if such is applicable to the topic and fits the requirements. The key function of evidence in an academic paper is to contribute to credibility of an argument and answer a question "so what?".
We don’t just write papers, although we can write papers on the theories behind mathematical and scientific principles.
The goal of academic writing is to convey a logical argument from an objective standpoint. Academic writing avoids emotional, inflammatory, or otherwise biased language. Whether you personally agree or disagree with an idea, it must be presented accurately and objectively in your paper. Avoid using personal pronouns to maintain objectivity.
Academic writing style employs formal phrasing, proper punctuation, prefers active voice (as it eases reading comprehension), avoids slang collocations, inversion, emphatic constructions, and exclamation marks. This course introduces you an academic phrasebank that is composed according to the key requirements of academic writing. Those that are appropriate can be included in the paper but should not be overused. After the paper is ready it is important to proofread it in order to eliminate any types of errors and make sure that none of the academic writing rules is violated.
The academic excerpt below illustrates all of the above-mentioned theoretical features of academic writing. Check it out to see how those rules are employed in the paper and which functions they perform.
The excerpt above shows how academic writing:
- refers to research not opinion;
- makes clear statements avoiding complicated sentence structure with lots of extra words;
- builds logical boundaries between the sentences using examples more information, and discussion;
- uses full forms of words, e.g. “do not” instead of “don’t”;
- uses appropriate vocabulary, i.e. the word choice is simple and to the point; no informal phrasing and/or language is present.