The Crux of Academic Writing

Guiding students on writing academic papers is an important task of university teachers, yet the task oftentimes remains informal. Over the years, I have been observing a familiar pattern among the students here in India, similar mistakes that I correct year after year (redundancy, thy name is teaching!). The purpose of this brief article (and the accompanying video) is to reveal those patterns and to share the most important points when it comes with academic writing. The crux, that is.

So what is academic writing? Also called scholarly writing, it is technical non-fiction writing for the academic purpose to draft academic papers. Academic papers come with many familiar names; seminar report, project report, essay, dissertation, thesis, monograph, article, scholarly literature, term paper and so on.

If there is anything called silver bullet for productivity, I would honour that title to the good old practice of maintaining a checklist, often overlooked in today’s world of sophistication and gadgetry. I have created a simple checklist for anyone who is writing an academic paper, the point is to avoid those commonly made mistakes.

Download MS Word version of this checklist here

Yes, most of these points are so simple that we oftentimes overlook. I have seen such mistakes committed in papers published in reputed journals with high Impact factor too. As the famous saying goes:

“Common sense is not so common.”
― Voltaire

The checklist is self-explanatory unless the writer is a complete novice. In case you are a complete novice and don’t understand terms such as ‘in-text citations,’ have a look at my video that explains everything practically.

Good and Bad Practices

Understand that academic writing is a subsection of writing in general, so all the hallmarks of good writing are fundamental to academic writing. Following points are noteworthy:

1. The first principle of good writing is Occam’s Razor; look for simple solutions instead of unnecessary complexities. You can’t mask mediocrity by sophistry.
2. Be resourceful. Read first, before you start writing.
3. Read articles fully (not just abstracts) before citing them in the paper. If you have no access, approach the authors or your teacher for a copy. Don’t cite articles guessing the content from abstract, or just because some other paper cited it. This problem is quite universal, not just to academic writing. For e.g., people share posts in social media without actually reading it.
4. Start with a skeleton/structure/outline of the essay. I recommend using a pen and paper for this step. Let it brew for some time. As you read and get more ideas, add these points to the skeleton and expand the nodes.
5. A good essay should form a story-line like logical flow and interconnectedness. Cohesiveness (connection of ideas such that it ‘stick’ together) should be at sentence levels, paragraph level, and the whole paper level. Paragraphs should be focused and connect one another, not just mere pieces of scattered information.
6. Perhaps it is a good idea to write the skeleton in your mother tongue and expand the nodes to make sure the big picture is as cohesive as possible. While drafting you may switch to English.
7. Excellent essays make use of dialectics, the art of making compelling, persuasive and cogent arguments.
8. Ensure the academic paper has all three hallmarks of style and eloquence: Purity (Good English), Perspicuity (Clear words, unequivocal and unambiguous statements), and Precision (No redundancy/Tautology).

Key elements of a good Academic Paper

1. Doublecheck for tautology that substantially degrades the essay. E.g. “Lineage sorting is the sorting of lineages. When the lineages sort in one way or another, this is called lineage sorting” (the whole sentence conveys nothing other than play with words senselessly)
2. Brevity is very crucial in academic writings. Don't fill the article with nonsense statements or redundant information to increase the word count in the hope of getting better grades. Make your article succinct, clear, original, and to the point rather than a boring piece that has stretched out like an elastic.
3. Articulate masterly prose in a well-crafted diction. Read great prose (For example, writings of authors like D’Arcy Thompson, Stephen Jay Gould, Mark Twain etc.)
4. Use elegant variation with the help of a good thesaurus. I use WordWebPro with Chambers thesaurus add-on in my PC, highly recommended. E.g. “Finding a job at 55 is much harder than finding a job in your 40s.” is flat and boring, it can be reworded to: “Finding a job at 55 is much harder than landing one in your 40s.” But don't abuse synonyms, don't use words without realizing subtle changes in the meaning in the context (by the way meaning in context is studied in linguistic subdiscipline called Pragmatics). Also, don't use complicated synonyms just to make it appear sophisticated, a clear sign of mediocrity in writing.
5. Always source reliable references to support consequential statements, substantial claims and numbers. Reliable references are published works of scholarly literature and academic books. Websites/Blogs/Nonacademic books/Wikipedia etc. are not reliable sources.
6. Avoid passive voice as much as possible as it leads to ambiguity.
7. Check your manuscript thoroughly for usage consistency (hyphenation, spelling variations, abbreviation in multiple forms). One easy way is to paste/upload the document to Google Docs and open the document> Add In> Consistency Checker.
8. Don't waste time formatting citations and references manually. Instead, invest time in learning how to use a reference manager like EndNote (my choice, but costs money) or Mendeley (freeware), to automate reference formatting.
9. Write abstract (also called summary) after completing the main paper. The abstract should be carefully written, see a good example below:

Annotated example taken from Nature 435, 114–118 (5 May 2005)

The bottom-line is academic writing, like any form of writing, has many dimensions. No one can write tabula rasa, read and be resourceful first before attempting to write. Always remember Occam’s Razor, simplicity beats complex solutions almost invariably. The provided checklist might help. Best wishes.