academic writing book

academic writing book

The Art of Persuasive Academic Writing

1. Introduction to Academic Writing

Academic writing is a difficult skill to master, and yet it’s the most important skill that you’ll learn in college. This module will help prepare you for academic writing, where you’ll learn to write an essay on economic topics. It will be particularly useful if you’re studying the following subjects: economics, finance, management, and business. Throughout the module, reference will be made to materials that are part of this research methods pyramid. This is shown below. In particular, this module will make reference to the “Studying Economics” section, which is part of the foundation/preparatory materials. Mentioned before, the ability to write for a specific audience is critical to persuasive writing. Academic writing often requires you to write for a knowledgeable audience. This is particularly the case in economics. For instance, the A-level marker will have a good knowledge of the economics syllabus. However, my experience suggests that many students become lost for reasoned arguments and in-depth explanations of their points. Too many students rely on using data response questions as an opportunity to regurgitate simple knowledge questions because they wrongly believe that every question has a simple correct answer. In reality, it’s often hard to separate the marks between knowledge and application. As the future generations of A-level economics students turn to the Internet for support with their studies, knowledge questions can be easily answered using free resources. This is unlikely to make you highly employable! A focus on improving the level of understanding and analysis is necessary in order to effectively learn academic economics and write persuasively.

2. Building a Strong Argument

The subsequent stage of sorting evidence into an order which will best support the argument. Remember that it’s rare to find a novel piece of evidence; most of what you use will be evidence that others have used before but which you are interpreting and evaluating in a different way. This evidence usually pre-exists and needs to be put into a logical order so that it becomes evidence which is specific to the argument that you are making. Usually this will involve some sort of synthesis so that the evidence is not just a series of statements which will, taken together, give the impression that some person or event occurred in a particular way. At its most sophisticated, this involves something which looks like a swot analysis of data from an external source (see section on synthesis).

Before you begin to write your essay, you need to select and order your material in the form of an essay plan. Think about the time that it will take to make an argument for a certain position or an argument against a certain position. Good essays take time. If you rush it will show.

This section deals with the most important part of writing a good academic essay: a strong argument. Most essays move from the general to the specific, but here, the general should be your answer to the question in the form of a hypothesis. You should then move to the specific and argue for or against a specific position. The more specific your argument, the more focused your essay.

3. Effective Research and Citations

It is generally wise to take an index card per information source and write clearly on it the topic of what is to be addressed with that information or the thesis/comment it is relevant to, and the information itself, with a page number for a later citation. This is the point at which a writer should begin to address the possibilities for his paper and what form it will take. At this point, a preliminary thesis can be chosen and mapped around the ideas and information the student intends to address. These resources and the thesis/topic mapping can give way to a very organized written work, with little more than simple expansion and well-cited material needed to further evolve it. This is writing at its finest, as the act of citation itself is designed to lead the reader to more information just in case the present work should be found insufficient.

Having found credible information, a student must learn to effectively digest and organize it. This is where having good reading comprehension and writing skills becomes very important. A student who is a novice to academic writing is likely to copy large amounts of direct quotes or information from their sources and later find themselves accused of plagiarism when this information comes out in their writing without a source citation. An effective writer will paraphrase important points and take note of which points came from which sources, so he/she won’t have to return to that source at a later date.

A student looking for credible information on a specific topic would do well to begin at a popular hub of credible information which is too often forgotten and readily available to most university students: the library. This step too, is not as simple as it once was. By going directly to a library it is likely that a student will find old hard copies of articles, and while these are sometimes the best sources, the convenience of online journals and articles is hard to beat. To this end, most universities subscribe to a large database of academic articles and/or have access to academic articles through certain online journals. The articles in these databases are just as credible and not as difficult to find as hard copies and can be printed for use at a much later date. This is the kind of efficient search procedure that is especially helpful for students.

Even here, there are valuable and less valuable ways to seek out what is known about a topic. For example, a fifth of a billion web pages carry information about schizophrenia. Someone searching Google with the word “schizophrenia” will come up with just less than half a million hits. The Google search engine ranks hits by a number of criteria, including how often the page is cited, and its first 10-20 hits are generally more credible than the chaff that remains. The bottom quartile of hits are generally not credible and regardless of rank, a page’s credibility can be assessed by taking a brief look at its contents to see whether it’s used well-known studies and concepts and to see if it is laden with spelling and grammar errors. This sort of criteria is what distinguishes experienced web searchers from novices who will simply find the first information they can on their topic and will more than likely use material that might not be credible.

It is not uncommon for students to show a reluctance to delve into academic research, and that is understandable. Researchers are often developing professional expertise or writing to forward an agenda, and articles are more likely to obscure than promote the truth. Nonetheless, given the extent to which credible information is located in published discourse, students must at one time or another learn to negotiate the research process. It is a rare student now who does not have some experience using the world wide web to find information, so we begin there.

4. Structuring Your Academic Paper

The body is where you get to express most of your research and opinions on the topic standing by your thesis. Make sure to organize clearly each of your points and follow with evidence to back up what you are saying. Do not just make one statement and then one statement of evidence as this will just make your paper seem like a list of points, make sure you explain how the evidence is relevant to the statement and repeat this. This makes each point have a much bigger impact.

Your thesis will drive the rest of your paper. The way you structure your thesis will help you a lot through the writing of the rest of the paper. The most common way a thesis is laid out is the 5W1H. This stands for Who, What, When, Where, Why, How. This does not need to be so strictly repeated through and will often be mixed in with the supporting arguments. But it is a good template to keep referring back to so you can make sure you are staying on the right track.

The thesis is the most important part of your paper. It is the reason for your paper, it is what you are trying to persuade somebody to believe, do or think. It will be the answer to the question you chose from.

5. Mastering Academic Writing Style

In order to have a proper understanding of academic writing, it is essential to read the important articles of academic writers so as to get some idea on which to write. To know the clear picture of academic writing, it is good to buy some books from the bookstores. By knowing the exact information of academic writing, you can get the idea of whether writing an academic essay is a part-time job or whether it is your regular job. With the help of the definition, you will get the idea of what needs to be incorporated in the work that is provided by you. From the specific details, the idea will get the basic terminology and techniques of the academic style. By consulting some knowledgeable person, the precise and finely academic writing can be fulfilled.

In general, the further you progress through your education, the more it will be expected that an assignment should sound academic. This means that the arguments must be supported by evidence as opposed to opinion, the language will be more precise, and more care will be taken to define terminology. This does not mean that an assignment should sound grandiose (it is important to remain clear and focused), but it is an opportunity to develop confidence in your writing.

Adopting an academic style of writing requires an understanding of its purpose. This style of writing is characterized by evidence-based arguments, precise word choice, avoiding the use of first person, and objectivity. While there are certain acceptable stylistic features to academic writing, it is important to remember that each assignment presents its own authoritativeness and clarity. Other stylistic features on an assignment can be to adopt a formal tone, using the appropriate language and addressing the issues with precision. It is important to be able to paraphrase most succinctly and importantly, to draw on the work of others to lend credibility to your arguments.