ARE YOU AFRAID OF ACADEMIC WRITING?

Ground-up shot of bookshelves with books by Tosta, L. (2019) with webpage title "Are you afraid of scholarly writing"

Writing is intimidating. Prefixing it with the word academic makes it more terrifying. But where does this fear of writing come from? Is it the act of writing that is daunting, or the process from start to finish, or the fear of plagiarism that has been drilled into us?

I would say a bit of all and possibly the anxiety of final grades.

At university, professors expect our work to be original, to use our own words and attribute all sources that we have referred to. The failure to attribute sources results in academic dishonesty.

But...

What do these expectations mean?

How can our work be completely original when we are also expected to quote other authors?

What does “our own words” mean? We do not own languages!

How do we know that an idea that we may have had, has not already been documented by a predecessor?

You, too, may be struggling with these questions. I am here to decode these expectations with some help from scholars and YouTube.

Here is a roadmap to guide you in your quest for finding answers to these questions.