Academic writing

Academic writing, or scholarly writing is a prose register that is conventionally characterized by "evidence...that the writer(s) have been persistent, open-minded, and disciplined in study"; that prioritizes "reason over emotion or sensual perception"; and that imagines a reader who is "coolly rational, reading for information, and intending to formulate a reasoned response." The particular stylistic means of achieving these conventions can differ considerably by academic discipline, however; these differences help explain the distinctive sounds of, for example, writing in history versus engineering or physics versus philosophy. One attempt to account for these differences in writing is known as the theory of "discourse communities," as explained in more detail below.

Discourse community

A discourse community is essentially a group of people that shares mutual interests and beliefs. "It establishes limits and regularities...who may speak, what may be spoken, and how it is to be said; in addition [rules] prescribe what is true and false, what is reasonable and what foolish, and what is meant and what not."

The concept of a discourse community is vital to academic writers across nearly all disciplines, for the academic writer's purpose is to influence how their community understands its field of study: whether by maintaining, adding to, revising, or contesting what that community regards as "known" or "true." Academic writers have strong incentives to follow conventions established by their community in order for their attempts to influence this community to be legible.

Discourse community constraints

Constraints are the discourse community's written and unwritten conventions about what a writer can say and how he or she can say it. They define what is an acceptable argument. Each discourse community expects to see a writer construct his or her argument using their conventional style of language and vocabulary, and they expect a writer to use the established intertext within the discourse community as the building blocks for his or her argument.

Writing for a discourse community

In order for a writer to become familiar with some of the constraints of the discourse community they are writing for. Across most discourses communities, writers will:
 Identify the novelty of their position
 Make a claim, or thesis
 Acknowledge prior work and situate their claim in a disciplinary context
 Offer warrants for one's view based on community-specific arguments and procedures 

Each of theses above are constructed differently depending on the discourse community the writer is in. For example, the way a claim is made in a high school paper would look very different from the way a claim is made in a college composition class. It is important for the academic writer to familiarize himself or herself with the conventions of the discourse community by reading and analyzing other works, so that the writer is best able to communicate his or her ideas.

Novel argument

Within discourse communities, academic writers build on top of the ideas established by previous writers. 

Good academic writers know the importance of researching previous work from within the discourse community and using this work to build their own claims. By taking these ideas and expanding upon them or applying them in a new way, a writer is able to make their novel argument.

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is the combining of past writings into original, new pieces of text. Usually attributed to Julia Kristeva, the concept of intertextuality is helpful for understanding that all texts are necessarily related to prior texts through a network of explicit or implicit links, allusions, repetitions, acknowledged or unacknowledged inspiration, and direct quotations. Writers (often unwittingly) make use of what has previously been written and thus some degree of borrowing is inevitable. One of the most salient features of academic writing irrespective of discipline is its unusually explicit conventions for marking intertextuality through citation and bibliography. Conventions for these markings (e.g., MLA, APA, IEEE, Chicago, etc.) vary by discourse community.

Conversation
Factoring in intertextuality, the goal of academic writing is not simply creating new ideas, but to offer a new perspective and link between already established ideas. This is why gathering background information and having past knowledge is so important in academic writing. A common metaphor used to describe academic writing is "entering the conversation", a conversation that began long before you got there and will continue long after you leave. A quote from Kenneth Burke encapsulates this metaphor:

Intertextuality plays into this because without it there would be no conversations, just hundreds of thousands of writings not connected or able to build on each other.  The listening until you can join the conversation can be seen as doing research. All of the research you read, is built on research instead of self-knowledge.

Key elements
A number of areas of importance in all academic and scholarly writing are:

Formal style or register
Writing should not be casual, but be in a appropriate formal register.
Appropriate references
Generally speaking, the range and organization of references illustrate the author's awareness of the current state of knowledge in the field (including major current disagreements or controversies); typically the expectation is that these references will be formatted in the relevant disciplinary citation system.
Bibliography
Typically this lists those articles read as background, and will include the sources of individual citations.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism, the "wrongful appropriation of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions", and the representation of them as one's own original work is considered academic dishonesty, and can lead to severe consequences.

Academic document types
 Book, in many types and varieties
 Chapter in an edited volume
 Book report
 Conference paper
 Dissertation; usually between 6,000 and 20,000 words in length
 Essay; usually short, between 1,500 and 6,000 words in length
 Explication; usually a short factual note explaining some obscure part of a particular work; e.g. its terminology, dialect, allusions or coded references
 Research Article
 Research Paper; longer essay involving library research, 3000 to 6000 words in length
 Technical report
 Thesis; completed over a number of years, often in excess of 20,000 words in length
 Translation

For students
 Exam questions and Essay titles; the formulation of these
 Instructional pamphlet, or hand-out, or reading list; usually meant for students
 Presentations; usually short, often illustrated

Summaries of knowledge
 Annotated bibliography
 Annotated catalogue, often of an individual or group's papers and/or library
 Creating a simplified graphical representation of knowledge; e.g. a map, or refining a display generated from a database. There will often be a 'key' or written work incorporated with the final work
 Creating a timeline or chronological plan. There will often be a 'key' or written work incorporated with the final work
 Devising a classification scheme; e.g. for animals, or newly arisen sub-cultures, or a radically new style of design
 Encyclopedia entry
 Journal article (e.g. History Today); usually presenting a digest of recent research
 Literature review; a summary and careful comparison of previous academic work published on a specific topic
 Site description and plan (e.g. in archeology)

Collating the work of others
 Anthology; collection, collation, ordering and editing of the work of others
 Catalogue raisonné; the definitive collection of the work of a single  artist, in book form
 Collected works; often referred to as the 'critical edition'. The definitive collection of the work of a single writer or poet, in book form, carefully purged of publishers errors and later forgeries, etc.
 Monograph or exhibition catalog; usually containing exemplary works, and a scholarly essay.  Sometime contains new work by a creative writer, responding to the work
 Transcribing, selecting and ordering oral testimony (e.g. oral history recordings)

Research and planning
 Experimental plan
 Laboratory report
 Raw data collection plan
 Research plan (sometimes called desk-based research).
 Structured notes

Disseminating knowledge outside the academy
 Call for papers
 Documentary film script or TV script or radio script
 Obituary
 Opinion; an academic may sometimes be asked to give an expert written opinion, for use in a legal case before a court of law
 Newspaper opinion article
 Public speech or lecture
 Review of a book, film, exhibition, event, etc.
 Think-tank pamphlet, position paper, or briefing paper

Technical or administrative forms
 Brief; short summary, often instructions for a commissioned work
 Peer review report
 Proposal for research or for a book
 White paper; detailed technical specifications and/or performance report

Personal forms
These are acceptable to some academic disciplines, e.g. Cultural studies, Fine art, Feminist studies, Queer theory, Literary studies.
 Artist's book or Chapbook
 Autobiography
 Belles-lettres; stylish or aesthetic writing on serious subjects, often with reference to one's personal experience
 Commonplace book
 Diary or Weblog
 Memoire; usually a short work, giving one's own memories of a famous person or event
 Notebooks

Newer forms
 Collaborative writing, especially using the internet
 Hypertext, often incorporating new media and multimedia forms within the text
 Performative writing (see also: belles-lettres)

Format
A commonly recognized format for presenting original research in the social and applied sciences is known as IMRD, an initialism that refers to the usual ordering of subsections:
 Introduction (Overview of relevant research and objective of current study)
 Method (Assumptions, questions, procedures described in replicable or at least reproducible detail)
 Results (Presentation of findings; often includes visual displays of quantitative data charts, plots)
and
 Discussion (Analysis, Implications, Suggested Next Steps)

Standalone methods sections are atypical in presenting research in the humanities; other common formats in the applied and social sciences are IMRAD (which offers an "Analysis" section separate from the implications presented in the "Discussion" section) and IRDM (found in some engineering subdisciplines, which features Methods at the end of the document).  

Other common sections in academic documents are:
 Abstract
 Acknowledgments
 Indices
 Bibliography
 List of references
 Appendix/Addendum, any addition to a document

See also
 Academia
 Academic authorship
 Academic journal
 Academic publishing
 Author editing
 Creative class
 Criticism
 Expository writing
 Knowledge worker
 Persuasive writing or rhetoric
 Publishing
 Rhetorical device
 Scientific writing
 Scientific publishing
 Scholarly method
 Scholarly skywriting
 Style guide

References

Further reading

General
 
 
 Borg, Erik (2003). 'Discourse Community', English Language Teaching (ELT) Journal, Vol. 57, Issue 4, pp. 398–400
 
 Coinam, David (2004). 'Concordancing Yourself: A Personal Exploration of Academic Writing', Language Awareness, Vol. 13, Issue 1, pp. 49–55
 
 Goodall, H. Lloyd, Jr. (2000). Writing Qualitative Inquiry: Self, Stories, and Academic Life (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press)
 Johns, Ann M. (1997). Text, Role and Context: Developing Academic Literacies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
 King, Donald W., Carol Tenopir, Songphan Choemprayong, and Lei Wu (2009). 'Scholarly Journal Information Seeking and Reading Patterns of Faculty at Five U.S. Universities', Learned Publishing, Vol. 22, Issue 2, pp. 126–144
 Kouritzin, Sandra G., Nathalie A. C Piquemal, and Renee Norman, eds (2009). Qualitative Research: Challenging the Orthodoxies in Standard Academic Discourse(s) (New York: Routledge)
 Lincoln, Yvonna S, and Norman K Denzin (2003). Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief (Walnut Creek, CA; Oxford: AltaMira Press)
 Luey, Beth (2010). Handbook for Academic Authors, 5th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
 Murray, Rowena, and Sarah Moore (2006). The Handbook of Academic Writing: A Fresh Approach (Maidenhead: Open University Press)
 Nash, Robert J. (2004). Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative (New York; London: Teachers College Press)
 Paltridge, Brian (2004). 'Academic Writing', Language Teaching, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp. 87–105
 Pelias, Ronald J. (1999). Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher's Body (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press)
 Prior, Paul A. (1998). Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy (Mahwah, NJ; London: Lawrence Erlbaum)
 Rhodes, Carl and Andrew D. Brown (2005). 'Writing Responsibly: Narrative Fiction and Organization Studies', The Organization: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, Issue 4, pp. 467–491
 Richards, Janet C., and Sharon K. Miller (2005). Doing Academic Writing in Education: Connecting the Personal and the Professional (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum)
 
The University of Sydney. (2019). Academic Writing.

Architecture, design and art
 Crysler, C. Greig (2002). Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment (London: Routledge)
 Francis, Pat (2009). Inspiring Writing in Art and Design: Taking a Line for a Write (Bristol; Chicago: Intellect)
 Frayling, Christopher (1993). 'Research in Art and Design', Royal College of Art Research Papers, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 1–5
 Piotrowski, Andrzej (2008). 'The Spectacle of Architectural Discourses', Architectural Theory Review, Vol. 13, Issue 2, pp. 130–144
 Roudavski, Stanislav (2010). 'Transparency or Drama? Extending the Range of Academic Writing in Architecture and Design', Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 3, 2, pp. 111–133

Bibliography
 Baldo, Shannon. "Elves and Extremism: the use of Fantasy in the Radical Environmentalist Movement." Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 7 (Spring 2010): 108-15. Print.
 Greene, Stuart. "Argument as Conversation: The Role of Inquiry in Writing a Researched Argument." n. page. Print.
 Kantz, Margaret. "Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively." College English 52.1 (1990): 74-91. Print.
 Porter, James. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community."Rhetoric Review. 5.1 (1986): 34-47. Print.

Writing
Category:Second language writing