5 Ways to Improve Your Style in Academic Writing

Academic writing is a useful skill in certain professions. However, even if you won't need academic writing in your career, you still have to practice it in high school, college, or university. Academic writing is all about intellectual efforts, accuracy, and the ability to follow the necessary requirements. Unfortunately, not all students can boast impressive academic writing skills. If you want to take your academic writing skills to the next level, you need a lot of practice.

However, your practice won't bring the desired results if you don't understand the specifics of academic writing. It's quite different from other types of writing so you must make sure that you're going in the right direction. Besides, writing can take a lot of time. In fact, many students purchase their papers on the internet not because they couldn't write these papers without help but because they simply don't have enough time.

Given that learning academic writing takes a lot of time and dedication, you should also have a certain level of enthusiasm. Let's be honest: academic papers are not always interesting to read. Quite often, research papers, theses, and dissertations turn out to be absolutely boring. The thing is that academic papers can be very niche-specific and not fun to read. However, they cannot be poorly written. You should always follow the rules of grammar and make sure that your writing is easy to understand. Given that you may write about quite complex or too specific concepts, the latter may seem almost impossible.

Fortunately, academic writing does not require you to look for the most beautiful expressions. It must be as easy to understand as possible so it must be clear and concise. On the one hand, you should be able to convey your thoughts in a brief manner. On the other hand, there's no need to use complex terms and jargon. If you can say something using simple words, you should do it. Anyway, one of the most important things is to stick to the formal language and to choose your words carefully to maintain the balance between simplicity and precision.

When writing academic papers, you should clearly understand what your paper is about and what it's based on. You should support all your claims with evidence from reputable academic sources, experiments, or research. Besides, you must create a clear logical structure. Therefore, the best approach is to write an outline first, and then the paper itself. Once you've finished writing, you should also edit and proofread your paper to make sure that there are no grammar errors. You should also check your writing style.

Now let's take a look at some great actionable tips that can help you improve your academic writing skills and develop the right style.

Stick with an objective tone

Academic writing must be impersonal but it shouldn't necessarily be boring. To make your writing less boring, you should be able to create the right structure. However, you cannot make your writing more engaging by using the first person. Even though some modern journals allow authors to use the first person, it's generally not acceptable in the academic world.

In academic writing, you may also find something that's not common in other writing styles, which is the passive voice. Although it's hard to say that the passive voice is encouraged in academic writing, you may use it sometimes to help your readers focus on the action itself, not those who do it. Given that your writing should be impersonal, we also recommend that you avoid adjectives like "remarkable," "awesome," "interesting," etc. Instead, you should let your readers decide whether your work is interesting or remarkable.

Don't waste your words

We've already mentioned that academic writing should be concise. Besides, many types of academic papers also have their word limits. Therefore, you should avoid repetition. Most often, writers repeat themselves when including information from the title in the abstract or introduction. Both the introduction and abstract should provide the most important information about your research, but you should make sure that you don't repeat the same things over and over again.

Another common mistake is including tables or graphs and then repeating information from them in the form of text. You should also avoid any unnecessary words. For instance, you should write that something was red, not "red in color," or that something "demonstrates a difference of 5%," not a "statistical difference of 5%."

Choose words precisely

Science is all about precision and accuracy, and academic writing isn't different. No matter what academic subject you're writing about, the chances are that this area has its specific vocabulary, and you should always take it into account. One of the main goals of academic writing is to help readers understand exactly what you want to say so you must make sure that they won't misinterpret your expressions. For instance, every biologist knows that spiders are not insects, and every physicist knows the difference between weight and mass.

Use qualifiers but don't overuse them

Even though science is always searching for truth, scientists know that what we believe to be true might change as we learn new facts. As people develop more effective tools, they can use more effective methods of research, and their theories evolve. As a result, there are few things that you can be sure about. Therefore, it's hard to find the emphatic language in academic writing. When writing academic papers, you might need to use phrases like "it is likely," "it indicates this," or "it is possible."

At the same time, you must avoid repetition, so don't use phrases like "it may be possible," "it probably suggests that," or "it may indicate." Such phrases make your writing weak and hurt the clarity of your writing.

Avoid colloquialisms and contractions

You can use contractions like "isn't," "don't," "won't," "can't," etc. in everyday conversations and informal writing. However, you cannot use them when writing academic papers. Instead, use "is not," "do not," "will not," and "cannot."

You should also avoid colloquialisms. Of course, they can help you demonstrate how good you are at writing, but you should keep in mind that many academic papers are intended for an international audience, and colloquialisms are specific to a certain type of English (American, British, Australian, Canadian). Besides, every variety of English also has its regional subtypes. One of your main goals is to make your paper easy to understand, no matter who will read it.

Academic writing might be challenging, but you can master it if you have enough practice. You just need to know some basic rules and make sure that you follow the academic standards. Your academic papers should be clear, concise, well-focused, and easy to understand. We hope that these simple tips will help you improve your writing style and create academic papers that bring good grades.