Are you a morning person or a night person? Knowing your writing preference relieves you of mental blocks. Make sure that you can do your writing without interruption on those times to avoid breaking your flow of thought.
Google Scholar is an excellent aid to help develop academic writing skills. It is an indispensable online, freely accessible search engine that lets you browse digital copies of articles related to your research interests.
Decades back, I have a hard time looking for related literature and judge whether a topic is worth pursuing. Google Scholar makes it easy as it archives articles from scientific journals. Just read the metadata and decide whether it suits your theme. You may read my previous post titled How to Start a Review of Literature and see how to make full use of the search engine.
Finding a good mentor to give you feedback on your write-ups helps a lot. Have constant interaction with a colleague who has a keen eye in spotting spelling, grammatical problems, or even your logic.
4. Look for Mentors to Hone Your Academic Writing Skills
However, knowing that my blog, this website, gains more traffic with each blog I write and realizing that additional income significantly supplements my regular job, I resolved to post articles once again frequently. I re-subscribed in Grammarly to help me compose my articles better yet. Pieces that are virtually free of errors get ranked well and gain more views. I believe it is a good investment for a blogger like me.
If you cannot afford the price of the article you are interested in, you may use free online sources like the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), CORE, Science Open, and Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), among others. Open access articles allow you to read the essential contents of the scientific paper like the methodology. Hence, you can improve your academic writing skills by citing relevant scientific articles.
Allocate specific time frames to write, and do it whether you are inspired to write or not. It will help if you know when is the best time to write. I usually allocate two hours to write an article. But I noticed an article written in 30 minutes gained a lot of views!
While I am confident that I can write and express myself well in English, I once subscribed in Grammarly to improve my grammar. My once too busy schedule and a change in routine at home prevented me from writing regularly and making full use of the app. Hence, I stopped using it.
T he University of Leeds recommends using a system that focuses on the elements of urgency and importance for prioritizing tasks. If a task is both urgent and important , do it right away. This task is your top priority. An example would be studying for a major test in two days that counts as a large percentage of your grade. Next, focus your attention on tasks that are urgent but less important. This might be an assignment that is due the next day but only counts as a small percentage of your grade.
A mind map serves as a useful note-taking tool for people who are visual learners. Tony Buzan developed the two-dimensional concept of mind mapping, which uses a visual layout of information that the human mind easily recognizes and remembers. Mind maps start with a large circle that represents the main idea or goal. Smaller circles labeled with main facts or ideas related to the topic are attached to the main circle, followed by additional circles containing information that expand on those facts and ideas. This process repeats for any points with additional information. In addition to using it for notes, the process works well for brainstorming new ideas and working through problems.
The ability to think critically will help you succeed in your classes and in the world after you graduate. What does this mean exactly? When you practice critical thinking , you analyze an issue based on the information and facts given to you or information you determine for yourself. Critical thinkers are able to separate the facts of a situation from how they might feel about an issue or how they initially react to a situation. A very simple example of critical thinking would be making medical decisions based on analyzing the information and advice provided by physicians — and possibly even researching additional information on your own — instead of making these decisions based on fear and other emotions.
A s you develop your critical thinking skills, it will become easier to formulate and organize arguments for assignments and easier to interpret the information presented to you in lectures and assignments. These skills will then move with you into the future as you work through problems and challenges in the workplace.
Master Time Management
U nfortunately, taking notes isn't a one-size-fits-all type of skill set. Most people develop their own individualized system that works for them, and a system that works for one person might not work for another. For example, some people like to take notes in an outline form that features main idea headings with bullet points underneath them that provide more details. Others write their notes in paragraph form using a narrative style, although they typically leave out all the small words to save time.
A key component of critical thinking is a willingness to dig deeper and to refuse to accept situations at face value without questioning them. If someone had told you as a child that the sky is green, for example, you could have just accepted it, or you could have used your critical thinking skills to question the statement by asking for evidence to prove the sky is green.
A ssignments that are important but not urgent can wait until later to do them but should still be completed. An example would be a major paper that is worth a lot of points but isn’t due for a few weeks. If a task is not urgent or important , then it would be your last priority. If you run out of time, these tasks could be skipped entirely with little or no penalty. This could be assignments that aren’t due until the end of the semester that either serve as extra credit or only count as a very small percentage of your grade.
Quality note-taking doesn’t involve simply writing down everything an instructor says during a lecture — word for word. It also doesn’t mean recording lectures on a smartphone and listening to them later. The goal of taking notes is to capture the main ideas and main points from a lecture so you can review them later when you have more time to really absorb the information. That means your notes need to make sense to you. Even better, if your note-taking abilities are really on-point, someone else could read your notes and understand the main points the instructor talked about in the lecture.
Again though, it’s hard not to assume it’s because of your problems with English. Remember that native speakers often struggle to understand academic text.
Don’t forget that a PhD is a very technical document. It is difficult to separate how much of the struggle you have is because of the difficulty with learning the new technical language of your discipline – which native speakers also have to do and also find difficult – and how much is because of speaking another language.
Often, the problem is because words that you already know are being used in new ways that are often contested. We know that definitions in academia are often hard to pin down
If you use simple, shorter sentences, you will avoid these common mistakes.
Overall their language is great, but a few errors show up time and time again. Try and think about what mistakes you make most frequently. If you’ve ever had your work proofread, have a look at the changes that the proofreader made. Can you spot any patterns? If you can, make a note of the changes the proofreader made and see if you can learn them.
Tip 7: Hire a proofreader
Take advantage of the resources offered your university. Many universities now have dedicated departments to offer courses and training for those for whom English is a second language. You should definitely take advantage of these. They are often run by academics who are experts in teaching ESL students.
Each day we send a short, thought-provoking email that will make you think differently about what it means to be a PhD student. Each is designed to be read in thirty seconds and thought about all day.
Writing a PhD when English is your second language is scary. It’s scary enough when English is your first language. 80,000 words, sometimes even more, in a technical language and at the highest level of academic rigour. Terrifying, right?
Instead, focus on presenting your ideas in short, concise sentences that are easy to read. Many of the problems we see when we proofread PhDs are down to poor sentence structure and using overly complex sentences.
Half the work in an academic paper goes into the preparation. Before you can write a paper, it’s a very good idea to plan it first. Many writers of all sorts use outlines. Even the article you’re reading right now started as an outline!
Academic English writing is different from other writing. It’s more structured and formal, following stricter guidelines and rules. Even the font and font size you use are important for academic English, so don’t even think about printing out that paper in Comic Sans font!
Another important part of writing, especially when writing a paper or report, is to write drafts. A draft is an unfinished version of a final paper. Some papers go through many drafts, as the writers see what works and what doesn’t, apply feedback, edit and revise the work. Writing drafts can turn a good paper into an excellent paper. Just look at how different the first and fifth draft of this book excerpt are!
FluentU helps you learn fast with useful questions and multiple examples. Learn more.
4. Learn by example
- Future Learn has courses on essay writing and research for writing available for free.
- Coursera has a series of courses available for a fee, among others. Browse around and you’re sure to find the course that fits your availability and study style.
- Inklyo offers affordable online courses on writing essays and writing persuasively. You can follow these courses at your own pace, so they’re easy to fit into any schedule. They also offer a variety of other courses and books that you can use to improve your English writing in lots of different areas, such as proofreading, grammar and more.
Knowing this information brings you a huge step closer towards mastering academic writing.
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By learning about academic writing, you’ll make things easier for yourself when the time comes to actually write.
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Literary analysis: A literary analysis essay examines, evaluates, and makes an argument about a literary work. As its name suggests, a literary analysis essay goes beyond mere summarization. It requires careful close reading of one or multiple texts and often focuses on a specific characteristic, theme, or motif.
Most academic disciplines employ their own stylistic conventions. However, all academic writing shares certain characteristics.
Academic papers may be done as a part of a class, in a program of study, or for publication in an academic journal or scholarly book of articles around a theme, by different authors.
Most published papers also have abstracts: brief summaries of the most important points of the paper. Abstracts appear in academic database search results so that readers can quickly determine whether the paper is pertinent to their own research.
Examples of Academic Writing
Academic writing is, of course, any formal written work produced in an academic setting. While academic writing comes in many forms, the following are some of the most common.
Research paper: A research paper uses outside information to support a thesis or make an argument. Research papers are written in all disciplines and may be evaluative, analytical, or critical in nature. Common research sources include data, primary sources (e.g., historical records), and secondary sources (e.g., peer-reviewed scholarly articles). Writing a research paper involves synthesizing this external information with your own ideas.
The thesis statement, found at the end of the first paragraph, is a one-sentence encapsulation of your essay’s main idea. It presents an overarching argument and may also identify the main support points for the argument. In essence, the thesis statement is a road map, telling the reader where the paper is going and how it will get there.