Academic Writing

KEY POINTS

Academic writing certainly differs in terms of its style, and features that are emphasized for academia. In higher education, academic writing serves to create new knowledge that is communicable to other scholars in the field, and each of these fields has its own use of terminology, vocabulary, and context. For qualitative researchers, this task is even more complex because you are communicating cultures, opinions, behaviors, feelings and etc that are often regarded as intangible and immeasurable.

So how do you improve your academic writing?

Understand that you need to know the right time and place to write effectively. Some people need to be in solitude, while others need to have soft background music. You may need to modify environment or get rid of the distractions that hinder you from writing effectively. What is your suitable writing environment like?

Refer to many online youtube videos to teach you how to write academically. Recognize and apply the practices that suited to your personality, circumstance, and passion.

Some people may think better in their native language but face the difficulty to translate into the English language due to the requirement to produce the dissertation in English. You may face additional obstacle because writing is not your natural talent, and you may not find words coming to you easily. You must know your strengths and weaknesses, and manage your weaknesses with some help from proofreaders or language experts. This is also the reason why not everyone is ready to do a Ph.D. because it is determined by the readiness to 'think-feel-do and write factor'.

Some people may also think in networks or pictures first before they can interpret and describe them through writing. With ATLAS.ti, data can be conceptualized in network view to assist in writing later. Additionally, there are some experts who suggest that if you can speak better than you write, you need to record your own voice and ideas first, and then transcribe your own thoughts into writing. So, therefore, you may convert what you speak into academic writing tone and style.

Remember that you are writing for your main readers, and not just for yourself. Your readers are usually your examiners who may come from a different country or setting. In qualitative research, you must emphasize the context of your research, and also the context as a researcher.

In addition, you may need to read, adapt or acculturize to the tone and style of the research field. This is prevalent if you are emphasizing on international journals where most of the scholars use a lot of terminology and bombastic languages that may be foreign to you. Otherwise you must also consider your style if you are writing for more readership among common people, or targeted for these top international readers to attract, engage or influence them with your writing.

Technically, there are five types of writing (which many other subtypes may be overlapping) in academic writing:

1. Expository: If the study aims to inform, explain or describe the phenomenon without incorporating the writers’ opinions or feeling.
2. Descriptive: If the study aims to help readers to visualize, or experience the context of the study by using metaphors, pictures, theoretical-conceptual framework, similes or symbols
3. Narrative persuasive: Commonly used in novels, poetry or biographies, it can also be in the form of autoethnography or action research for qualitative studies.
4. Persuasive: Useful when the opinion or ‘voice’ of the writer is presented to highlight the intellectual articulation and discussion. However, there is a need to critically evaluate if the written content reflects too much narcissism or bias. Therefore, persuasive writing must consider methods of triangulations, intercoder reliability or audit trails in qualitative research.
5. Creative: In academic writing, this must be intellectually stimulating and based on data or facts. Given (2008) highlighted the term Creative nonfiction (is also called journalistic) and takes the form of the essay that is based on researched material. Creative writing in qualitative research is useful for presenting complex information into diagrams, tables, models or etc where readers can easily grasp, understand and apply the important findings in the study. Creative writing can be applied in academic writing because it can prove, entertain and engage with readers in communicating the content, process or context of research. Creative writing portrays the higher order thinking skills of the writer as indicated in the Bloom's Taxonomy.

Last updated on 9.9.2019

APPLICATION

1. Take a piece of a clean sheet of paper and scribble down your ideas freely without prejudice
2. Identify which ideas are necessary, appropriate and relevant for the parts of your research proposal. Conversely, you may also need to recognize which ideas are unnecessary, inappropriate and irrelevant to you. Build and use a checklist for your decision-making.
3. Determine your readership (or audience).
4. Set your purpose and field of your research. Relate point 1-3 above, decide on the types of writing for your readers.
5. Structure your content. Arrange your ideas to be chronological, logical or sequential.
6. Select your keywords and also determine your Unit of Analyses (UoA) for you to search for sources judiciously, strategically and correctly.
7. Write and read over your writings so that you are satisfied with your content.
8. There are six steps to improve sentence structures:

• Validate the information within the sentence is clear and accurate
• Use transitional words
• Use active voice
• Use active verbs
• Follow grammar use with Grammarly

RESOURCES

1. Wallwork, A. (2016). English for writing research papers. Springer.
2. Given, L. M. (2008). The SAGE encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (Vols. 1-0). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412963909