Seven Features of Academic Writing and Their Importance
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This essay focuses on seven features of academic writing and their importance. These features include structure, evidence, criticality, balance, precision, objectivity, and formality. The essay explains the importance of each feature and how it contributes to making academic writing credible, authentic, and worth reading.
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Scholarly publications and universities make use of a formal style of writing, which is known as the academic writing.It is characterized by structure, clear and focused manner of writing that is backed up by evidence (Altınmakas and Bayyurt, 2019). The main purpose of academic writing is to help the writer understand the written work. The present essay will focus on seven features of academic writing and their importance. Structure is an important feature of academic writing that provides the base to any written work. This is determined by the genre of writing. The structure of a report will be different from that of an essay. While a report comprises of sections such as introduction, main body and conclusion; an essay comprises of a thesis statement and clear paragraphs that begin with a topic sentence. Structure is important as academic writing is required to have clarity to be able to have a logical flow from one section to another (Teng, Qin and Wang, 2021). Proper structure assists in making a logical progression throughout the written work. It also makes the various parts clearly connected with one another. Moreover, structure requires careful planning which further ensures that the written piece of work is focused and comprises of ideas that logically flow throughout. Structure is regarded as an important feature of academic writing because a text that is well structured helps the reader to not only follow the argument of the text but also navigate through it. A cohesive text is one that comprises of a clear structure and logical flow. Evidenceisanotherfeatureofacademicwhichcomprisesoftheelementof responsibility. It provides an opportunity to the writer to provide justifications for the claims made in the work. This feature is important as it involves demonstration of understanding of the source texts that have been used for making the written piece of academic writing. Moreover, evidence provides credibility to the work. Evidence assists the writer in persuading the readers to accept the claims made in the work. Absence of an element makes an argument as merely an opinion. Hence, evidence is one of the central features of academic writing which makes it credible. Acknowledge the source of ideas, data and findings further provides defense against the allegations associated with plagiarism. Furthermore, provision of evidence is important as it enables the readers to perform assessment of the quality of findings. Moreover, evidence helps in not only confirming the claims but also qualifying them thus helps in developing the paper. Evidence provides support to the ideas expressed throughout the writing. Further, the writer is 1
able to substantiate each assertion made within the writing with the help of evidence. In this way, evidence is important for improving the authenticity and credibility of the writing. Academic writing is required to be critical rather than just describing. This requires the writer to analyse as well as evaluate the information before writing it. Also, they are required to make apt judgments about the information as well. This, known as critical writing, involves through research in order to enable the writer to explore an aspect in a critical manner while writing it. Being critical is important for an academic writing piece as it is one of the higher – order thinking skills (Mitchell and et.al., 2021). It also assists in evaluating a topic from different perspectives. In this way, critical writing provides a holistic view of the subject matter. Further, critical writing is an important part of academic writing as it helps in evaluating a topic on the basis of different criteria. Rather than providing a narrative description of a topic, the writer provides various contrasting views on the concerned topic. This provides strength to the piece of academic writing. Balance is an element of academic writing which is important to be focused upon it is required for the academic writing to be balanced. In other words, for a piece of academic writing to be effective, it is necessary that consideration is given to various sides of a particular issue being studied. It is evident that it is possible to challenge various arguments and evidences n a subject matter (Huisman and et.al., 2018). Therefore, it becomes of utmost importance that academic writing should provide stance of the writer on a particular topic. Moreover, balanced writing is important for avoiding bias. Hedges is an effective way of making the writing balanced. Balanced writing also arouses the interest of the reader and prompts him to read more. Thus it makes the written material more relatable and significant. Furthermore, it prevents the issue of presenting a written work in a extreme perspective, thus depicting a balance between various opinions and stances. Academic writing also comprises of a feature known as ‘Precision’. This involves utilizingspecificfigures,datesandotherinformation.Thisfeatureprovidesclarityand conciseness to the written piece of work. In other words, it involves ensuring that fuzziness and ambiguity are avoided (Vo, 2019). Further, minimal number of words are used for conveying information which makes the writing concise. However, care is taken not to compromise on the clarity of the information. The element of precision is inculcated in academic writing by 2
emphasizing on the audience and framework, so that the readers understand the information which is being conveyed. Moreover, in order to make the writing precise, use of good terminology is essential. This requires giving appropriate names to things and ideas. Precision also includes the use of technical or subject specific vocabulary. Precision is important as it assists in developing the understanding of the readers regarding a particular writing. It helps the readers to better understand the subject matter and its purpose. Moreover, it also helps in conveying large amounts of information within a specified word limit which assists in saving the time of the readers (Kwak, 2017). More information can be gained from a precise writing in less time. This increases the usability of the written work. Academic writing is objective which is another important feature of it. This includes focusing on information and arguments instead of the writer. This is the reason why nouns and nouns phrases are utilized more in academic writing in place of adverbs and verbs. Furthermore, academic writing is made objective by utilizing more passive structure rather active ones. In this way, issues are evaluated and presented in academic writing in order to arrive at an objective position (Wingate, 2019). This is important as it helps the writer to arrive to a position which is informed by research and lays emphasis on reasoning as compared to personal opinions. The element of objectivity is important as it assists in avoiding bias in writing. It helps then writer to present views on a particular situation and topic in a balanced way thus avoiding prejudice and predisposition. Moreover, it also arouses the interests of the readers as they are more interested in knowing about the reasons and login rather than the personal opinion of the writer (Teng, Qin and Wang, 2021). Finally, the last important feature of academic writing is that it is formal as compared to the everyday writing. This involves the use of longer words and phrases and sentences which are more complex. Informal and colloquial words are avoided in academic writing. It also avoids the use of those expressions which are commonly used in spoken English. Therefore, there are lists such as academic vocabulary and academic words which are used in this piece of writing (Maamuujav, Olson and Chung, 2021). The element of formality means that academic writing should not only be explicit but should also covey all the information to the readers which help them in understanding the meaning of the written work. 3
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The element of formality is important as it assists in avoiding miscommunication. In other words, it assists in communicating the actual meaning of the written work. When rhetorical questions and vague phrases are avoided in the writing, it helps in conveying the correct meaning in a simple and understandable form. This increases the credibility and authenticity of the writing (Samigullina, 2018). Formal writing involves use of full forms instead of contractions. This is important to prevent confusion and convey clear and accurate information. From the essay, it can be concluded that academic writing is used in a number of context and has certain specific features. These are evidence, structure, formality, precision, objectivity, balance,and critical. All these features have specific characteristics which are important to be included in the writing. These are the aspects that make academic writing worth reading. Each element has its own importance and provides strength to the written work. These elements are also important for maintaining the credibility and authenticity of the writing. Moreover, the elements help the readers to develop an understanding of the material and also develop their interest to read further. They also provide logical flow to the writing which assists in easy navigation throughout the text. All these elements when incorporated into the text make it cohesive, succinct and reliable. 4
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