This video is brought to you by eapfoundation.com the website for all your academic English needs. So this video will answer the question What is academic writing? And there are two parts to the video.
First I'll give a definition of academic writing then I'll look in more detail at the features of academic writing. First then a definition. So academic writing is writing which communicates ideas, information and research to the wider academic community.
And it can be divided into two types, student academic writing and expert academic writing. These two forms differ in terms of what they are, the audience and the purpose. Student academic writing is used as a form of assessment at university, or it may also be used at schools in preparation for university study. The audience will be your tutors or professors at university and the purpose is to demonstrate learning. Expert academic writing on the other hand is writing for publication in academic journals or books.
The audience is other experts in the same field and the purpose is the creation of new knowledge. And although these two types of academic writing are different in terms of content, audience and purpose the standards and requirements are the same for both. And this may sense.
For example, if you're learning to drive a car, if you're a student driver, you still need to obey the speed limit, stop at red lights and so on. In other words, you have the same standards and requirements that expert drivers do. So let's look now in detail at the features of academic writing.
There are seven different features that we'll look at. Academic writing should be structured, evidenced, critical, precise, balanced, objective and formal. So let's begin by looking at structured. Academic writing should have a clear structure, in order for the reader to easily follow the main ideas or arguments. The structure often derives from the genre of writing.
For example, reports will usually begin with an introduction, followed by a method section, a result section and a discussion section. An essay, on the other hand, will have an introduction, including a thesis, and will be divided up into body paragraphs, each of which should have a topic sentence. And it will finish with a conclusion, probably containing a summary. These are the most common genres of academic writing, but there are also many others, for example literature review, dissertation, research proposal and so on, each of which has a different kind of structure.
Being well structured also means that the writing should be coherent. In other words, there should be a logical progression of ideas. It should also be cohesive. In other words, the different parts are clearly connected. For example, by using reference words and transition signals.
Being well structured also means we need a clear focus. So for the academic writer, that means you need to understand very clearly what you're writing about and why. It also needs careful planning before writing.
In some ways, you can think of academic writing as being like a house. The door is the introduction that leads in. and then each room is like a different section or different paragraph which serves a different purpose.
Now if you were building a house you wouldn't just start building, you would plan it very carefully first. And the same is true for academic writing. Without careful planning it won't have a very clear structure and it will be very difficult for the reader to follow the ideas. So the second feature of academic writing is that it should be evidenced. This means opinions and arguments should be supported by evidence.
In other words, facts, reasons, examples, statistics, citations. Let's have a look now at an authentic academic text. This is the introduction to an article about dengue fever. Dengue is a major global problem in many parts of the world, causing epidemics throughout the developed and developing countries. So this is a fact.
And the fact is strengthened by the citation, Bart et al. 2013. In Thailand specifically, frequent outbreaks in all administrative provinces of Thailand due to, so this is giving the reasons, vector breeding conditions and hyper-endemic nature of the virus. And this causes significant impact on public health resources. This is a fact. Again, supported by a citation. Shu et al., 2019. In Bangkok alone, a recent 2017 outbreak resulted in over 4,000 case counts being reported in a single month.
So that's a statistic. Again, supported by a citation. Ministry of Public Health, 2020. And this is very much a quality of academic writing, the use of in-text citations.
So being able to cite and reference sources appropriately is a key skill that any academic... writer needs to learn. The next feature is critical. So academic writing does not simply describe.
Information should be analysed and evaluated. In other words the writer should make judgments about it before it's used and sometimes in making those judgments you may decide not to use the information at all. In order to be able to write critically you really need to understand the topic in depth so a great deal of research will be needed. Here again is another authentic example. While the studies in Table 1 have employed both quantitative and qualitative methods, all were observational.
An observation study may well reveal data, however an observational study is incapable of ruling out potential non-linguistic factors. For example, so here this is critical evaluation by revealing the limitations of previous research. The next feature is precise. Academic writing should use clear and precise language. This will enable the reader to follow the ideas more easily.
So this includes the use of technical, in other words, subject-specific vocabulary. Sometimes such vocabulary may need defining. For example, if the term is not commonly used by other experts, or if you need to demonstrate understanding to your tutor. So that's for student academic writing. So if we look back at the article on dengue fever, we can see some examples of technical vocabulary.
So there's the phrase vector breeding conditions and hyperendemic nature of the virus. So these phrases are difficult for us, the non-specialists, to understand. But these terms have precise meaning for the expert audience that this article was written for. Next, academic writing should be balanced. This means that academic writing should give consideration to all sides of the issue and avoid being biased.
Additionally, an academic writer should show how strong their claims are. And this is often done using hedges or boosters. For example, the evidence suggests that more safety controls are needed.
Or, this could be caused by lack of education. So the word suggests is a way of hedging or making this statement less certain. And so is the word could.
And these sentences could be written more strongly. Clearly there is a need for more safety controls. The research indicates that the lack of education is to blame. So these sentences use boosters. The first one, clearly.
The second one, indicates. So showing how strong or certain your ideas are, or how uncertain your ideas are, is a way to give balance to your writing. Next, academic writing should be objective. Emphasis should be placed on the arguments and information, rather than on the writer. So instead of I heated the water, the water was heated.
So this uses passive, which is fairly common in academic writing. Instead of in my opinion, it can be seen that. So this is an impersonal structure using it. And impersonal structures with it and their are again very common in academic writing. Finally, academic writing should be formal.
When thinking about academic writing, this is maybe the first feature that comes to mind. So academic writing tends to use more complex sentences and also tends to avoid contractions and colloquial or informal words. For example, instead of this isn't the case, this is not the case.
There are many words and collocations which are used more frequently in academic writing than in non-academic writing and researchers have made lists of these. For example, the academic word list, the AWL, and the academic collocation list, the ACL. For example, instead of there are lots of reasons, there are a significant number of reasons. Instead of conditions changed a lot, which is not very formal, there was considerable variation in the conditions. So both of those examples use more academic vocabulary, including words from the academic word list.
So to sum up, we've seen a definition of academic writing, and we've seen seven features of academic writing, namely that it is structured, evidenced, critical, precise, balanced, objective, and formal. For more information on this and related topics, please visit the website eapfoundation.com. You can also find a worksheet for this video and others in the series by visiting eapfoundation.com forward slash social.