Features of Academic Writing: Importance and Personal Reflection

This article discusses the essential features of academic writing, including structure, evidence, criticality, and precision. It also includes a personal reflection on the importance of these features and how to improve academic writing. The article cites various sources to support the discussion.

Academic Writing

Academic writing is the formal form of writing the is clear, structured, well informative,
focussed and evidence and citation based writing. The main purpose of the academic writing is to
aid the understanding of a reader (Wu, X., Mauranen, A. and Lei, L., 2020). Academic writing is
in the formal tone and style but is not difficult to understand as it does not have much long
sentences or complicated vocabulary. The present essay is the discussion of the features of the
academic writing and their importance. Further there is the personal reflection on what factors
are learned during the course that will improve academic writing.
The academic writing is the formal objective in which focus is placed over the quality of wiring,
arguments and information that has evidence rather than on a writer. Therefore in an academic
writing there are some features that essential to be considered while writing and academic
writing.
The foremost feature of the academic writing is the structure of the writing (Giltrow, J.,
Gooding, R. and Burgoyne, D., 2021). The academic writing contains a clear structure that is
derive form the genre of the writing topic such as it must have introduction, aims and objectives,
a method of research etc. this feature is important as its let the reader know what basically a
academic writing is about such as its rational, aims and objectives etc. The structured academic
writing helps a writer in the clear planning before writing the content as this will maintain the
flow of writing and also set clear, logical and coherent progression throughout the writing. This
is also significant for the academic writing because its keeps the writing of the writer connected
in an order which is easy for reader to understand (Budjalemba, A. and Listyani, L., 2020).
The second feature of academic writing is the evidenced this means that the opinions and
arguments written in the academic writing are the always supported by the evidence. The
importance of this feature is that this keeps the information written by experts protected by their
rights and also paper in not under the consideration of academic misconduct. Also if the reader
wants and in-depth knowledge of some in between topic the proper citation and referencing helps
in reading that article form which writer has referenced the information. When writing an
academic paper as an academic writing the evidence based academic writing is paid more value
and also the publishers and experts treat it as a more appropriate and ethical (Prinz, P. and

Arnbjörnsdóttir, B., 2021). Therefore this feature is important when there is discussion of
academic writing.
As a academic writer the information written by an writer must be critical because the
academic writing is not only about description or briefing of an information (Нестеренко, Л.,
2021). Therefore, academic writing must contain a feature of critical because it very important
for a writer to analyse the information and evaluate it appropriately in order to justify its writing.
Because when a reader reads any academic writing accepting the facts is not enough but putting
judgement for what is written is correct or not is the part of academic writing. This implies that
the academic writing must be critical writing in order to show its worth and writers capability to
think critically and the analyse the facts in better manner because every person has different
views on same topic.
The fourth feature precise which means that the language and vocabulary used in the
academic writing must be clear enough to be understood by the common readers (Jiang, F.K. and
Hyland, K., 2020). It is very important that academic writing must be precise and clear in the
meaning which means all the technical words used in the writing must contain clear meaning
same as the non technical words. In order keep the writing balanced it very essential for
academic writer to show some balanced feature that means the writer must take care of the all
these feature in its writing so that the academic writing is correct and efficient (Wu, X.,
Mauranen, A. and Lei, L., 2020).
Reflection
When I attended a course of study skills at the higher education I was involved into
learning many skills through different modules, activities and researches. From the day 1 of my
course I started my learning with written communication skills where I leaned about the
avoidance of contractions, expressions and long sentences during my writing. This learning
module has helped me in gaining the experience of how to make the academic writing more
balanced with small and moderate level of sentence rather than using the long and complex
sentence that are difficult to understand. This improved my writing pattern during the academic
writing as I learned to form the better size of sentences. Later in the sessions I learned about the
academic learning topics such as academic vocabulary list, academic collocation list etc. this is
very important part of my course as this helped me in improving my precise feature of the
academic writing. There I also learned about the value of academic writing and how to avoid the

academic misconduct as this is illegal and unethical. This session was very knowledgeable for
me to improving my academic writing as this made me think more critical and also I was able to
reference my work with the evidence (Yuvayapan, F. and Bilginer, H., 2020). This made my
work evidence based which made my opinions and arguments more experts validated. Thus, the
whole course has made me improve my academic writing skills and also has made my
information and arguments more worth reading.
It is understood from the above report that as an student in the higher education or during
the research it Is very essential to have deep knowledge of the format of the academic writing.
Thus for the academic writing to be appropriate it must have an integration of the features such
as structured, precise, evidenced, critical and balanced. Hence, all these features of the academic
writing has its own importance in making a academic writing of an individual accurate,
understanding for a reader and publishers. Thus, there are different ways to improve academic
writing the main is through effective reading habits of literatures and accurate academic writing
articles.

References:
Books and Journals
Budjalemba, A. and Listyani, L., 2020. Factors contributing to students’ difficulties in academic
writing class: Students’ perceptions. UC Journal: ELT, Linguistics and Literature
Journal. 1(2). pp.135-149.
Giltrow, J., Gooding, R. and Burgoyne, D., 2021. Academic writing: An introduction. Broadview
Press.
Jiang, F.K. and Hyland, K., 2020. Prescription and reality in advanced academic
writing. Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos
(AELFE). (39). pp.14-42.
Prinz, P. and Arnbjörnsdóttir, B., 2021. The art and architecture of academic writing. John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Wu, X., Mauranen, A. and Lei, L., 2020. Syntactic complexity in English as a lingua franca
academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 43. p.100798.
Wu, X., Mauranen, A. and Lei, L., 2020. Syntactic complexity in English as a lingua franca
academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 43. p.100798.
Yuvayapan, F. and Bilginer, H., 2020. Identifying the needs of postgraduate students: The first
step of academic writing courses. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies. 16(2).
pp.595-611.