Writing academically

This is the third blog. This blog presents some writing issues that may not enable researchers to get published or succeed in their PhD vivas. This blog comes as a response to my colleague’s question. Thank you very mush dear colleague for getting in touch and raising the issue of writing academically. I wish you the best of luck.

A message from a colleague

One of the colleagues raised the issue concerning ‘how to write academically’. He said to me that his publication had been rejected, because his article was poorly written. The journal reviewers highlighted some writing issues which he has no clue how to sort them out. He explained to me that he attended some sessions of academic writing, but those sessions seemed that they did not cover everything about academic writing. He ended his message with ‘how to write academically?

In this blog, I shall highlight some writing issues, and shall suggest some materials for further readings on academic writing (see section further readings below). I am not going to produce a guide of ‘how to write academically’. To put it simply, academic writing is a very complex process, and requires a combination of the following principles: thinking before writing, proofreading and editing as you write a paragraph, and complying with the regularities of unive rsities and the journal policies.

Facts about academic writing

I shall start with informing the audience that academic writing is still an issue for many researchers. It has nothing to do with being an English native or a non-native, because academic writing involves some rules and techniques that must be learnt as well as practiced. Indeed, researchers should be proficient in English, but also need to familiarise themselves with the set of rules and techniques of academic writing. So Academic writing is 50% knowledge about English language and 50% knowledge about the set of rules and techniques. The rules are not the ones set by the journal editors and reviewers, because those rules reflect the journal policy. Here I am rather talking about the rule of the academic writing that every researcher is supposed to follow in order to write academically. Also, I am not talking about research methodology, but about how to write a report for your research work.

Completing the research is just one box ticked in the evaluation of the research work. The examiners and reviewers may highlight the issue of ‘badly written thesis or article’, and thus the researcher may not be successful. A successful piece of research work is the one which contains complex ideas and adheres to the values of rigour and integrity as well as is clearly written. So writing is part of research.

Students in the writing stage may still be confused, and cannot express what they are researching. In order to write clearly, the researcher needs to understand thoroughly the research, so he/she can expound the ideas and the claims. Some researchers employ proof-readers to help them identify what is terribly going on with their writing. That is a good idea, and I support that; better than sending off ‘a poorly written piece of research’ to examiners and reviewers. However, the best proof-reader is always the person who has undertaken the research. So always be your own proof-reader, and do not rely too much on other proofreaders.

Your writing for the research work comes in the form of a business report. The first personal pronoun ‘I’ can be used throughout the thesis or the article. However, this does not mean that you cannot use the passive form, knowledge on passive form is needed in order to write academically.

The key element in writing is clarity (Bailey, 2015). Your readers must not feel being tortured, otherwise they loose interest (Whitaker, 2009). There is a set of principles of academic writing (check Whitaker’s (2009) guide (see section further reading below).

Obviously, writing about chemistry is completely different from writing about linguistics and education. For example, in linguistics and education writing a thesis or an article is completely different from writing a book. Here is an example of the style of writing taken from a book:

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as this. There’s clearly not an unproblematic dividing line between being truthful and not truthful. There are infinite shades of meaning in between. There’s understatement and overstatement, metaphor and analogy, vagueness and allusion. And irony. Irony exists as part of almost all human interaction, from flirting and teasing to bullying and criticising to comedy (Seargeant 2019, p.38).

Here I am not criticising the author for such a style. Rather, I am showing an example to further discuss the style of academic writing. The idea was expressed clearly, but the paragraph still needs ‘editing’ (check Whitaker’s (2009) guide for more details on editing). Indeed, writing a thesis or an article in such a style, as in this passage taken from the book, may not help you succeed in your research. Examiners and reviewers may not feel comfortable while reading your writing, and thus, they ask to ‘rewrite’. You should avoid the following: informal style (e.g., ‘of course’ replacing by ‘indeed’), contractions (e.g., it’s, there’s) and phrases (e.g., ‘and irony.’) meaning that always write in complete sentences.

Get it wright!

• Do not strike the drums: some researchers tend to use some attractive phrases to talk about unimportant stuffs within the research. I shall say ‘do not strike the drums’ because that reflects the fact that you are trying to sound important instead. In your research, there are bits in the research work which need to be promoted, for example, when reaching a conclusion or an interesting finding you are allowed to make these interesting stuffs to be more standing out by using eloquent style and nice phrases. Indeed, you still need your language proficiency to express the findings and to create some terms for the insights you developed in the research (remember that we are talking about PhD research and publishable work which should reflect a contribution).  
• Do not be opinionated: you should not overstate your arguments and keep supporting them. Maybe you need to mention your arguments very few times just to remind the reader as well as to connect to the selected concepts and theories for better clarifications.
• Do not let the readers feel ‘a concept, an idea, or an understanding suddenly emerged within the paragraphs’: you need to ensure that the ideas, understandings, concepts, insights have been introduced. If they are introduced earlier in the article  or in the first chapter of the thesis, you can signpost to mention what they are and describe them in a three- or four-word phrases to remind the readers, but the phrases should be part of a complete sentence. You can also cross-reference the section where mode details are given (e.g., see section X).
• Be succinct (brief and accurate). You should try your best to avoid wordiness (e.g., ‘This research expounds the factors of …’ Instead of ‘this research presents and explains the factors of …’). You should avoid wordiness in your writing, because that may reflect the fact you are struggling to reach the word count. Additionally, for some reviewers and examiners who are picky and grumpy they may say: you did not care about your paper, the researcher needs to improve his writing, or the paper or the thesis is badly written and therefore is referred for a resubmit. Avoid wordiness to avoid comments as such.
• Write concisely (do not repeat ideas): a coherent paragraph is the one which explains just one idea supported by arguments. You can start your paragraph with a simple sentence, which is your topic sentence, to make it easy for the readers to understand what the paragraph is about. Then, you can switch to writing some complex sentences, but clear sentences; you should always remember that clarity is the key (check McCombes’ (2019) blog).
• Be consistent: you should not keep changing words by their synonyms because the reviewers and examiners will make a comment on that (e.g., sometimes using this research and sometimes this study). There are several issues with using synonyms; they may detract you from what you want to say; they could also have different meanings when they are in different contexts (language is context); and you may forget to change the prepositions that comes after the word you changed (because English works in collocation; always check the dictionary for collocations).
• Logically ordered: Well done for thinking about including complex ideas in the research work. However, your ideas must be logically ordered (e.g., A leads to B and B leads to C, and so on). Chronological order of the idea is not as important as logical order. So what matters is ‘the logic of ideas’.
• Reporting verbs: in academic writing, it is necessary to refer to the findings of previous research. You need to understand the quote, so you can have the right reporting verb: ‘claim’ is not ‘explain’(check the following for more details: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/globalpad/openhouse/academicenglishskills/grammar/reportingverbs/).
• Get the right tense for your sentence: A variety of tenses can be included in your writing, and these include: future, past (simple and perfect), and present (simple and perfect) (check Caplan’s (2015) guide for more details on tenses).

• Your punctuation matters: The comma (,) could matter too. Separating two complete sentences with a coms means that the researchers is till talking about the same idea. The researcher should also determine whether to use the oxford coma (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter: the third comma that comes before ‘and’ is called oxford comma); be consistent in case you decide to add the oxford comma.

A comma, for example, can be used to indicate a non-defining relative clause or when listing a set of concepts. But it can also be used to break up the rhythm of a sentence, to add cadence and shape to the way it flows. (Seargeant, 2019, p.41)

• Semi-colon (;) is used when the researcher is bringing along a related idea, or listing.
• Colon (:) is used to explain.
• Dash (e.g., His seminal work also examined the effects of online communication on language – yet pragmatically relevant – by focusing on … )

A through understanding of the different types of punctuation is required in order to write academically (check the following https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/globalpad/openhouse/academicenglishskills/grammar/punctuation/).

All in all, I shall help writers by thinking about the following laws of academic writing:

• Prepare rigorously: read your notes and understand your sources, highlights the quotes that need to be paraphrased, and ensure you have the reference for each academic backup.
• Proofread ruthlessly: learn from your mistakes, and as they say ‘practice makes everything perfect’.
• Format religiously: Follow what the university or the journal editors ask for (e.g., style of referencing and word count, and the structure of the thesis or the article)

Further readings

Bailey, S. (2015). Academic writing: A handbook for international students. London: Routledge.  

Caplan, N. (2015). Grammar choices for graduate and professional writers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

McCombes, S. (2019). How to write a paragraph. [Blog]. Rederived from: https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/paragraph-structure/ [Accessed 24 December 2019].

Seargeant, P. (2019). The emoji revolution: How technology is shaping the future of communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whitaker, A. (2009). Academic writing guide: A step-by-step guide to writing academic papers. Retrieved from: http://www.vsm.sk/Curriculum/academicsupport/academicwritingguide.pdf [Accessed 24 December 2019].

Blog: https://www.ref-n-write.com/trial/research-paper-example-writing-results-discussion-section-academic-phrasebank-vocabulary/

Blog: https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/style-and-usage/academic-writing-skills.html

Blog: https://writingcenter.gmu.edu/guides/the-three-common-tenses-used-in-academic-writing

University guide: https://www.york.ac.uk/media/study/schoolsandcolleges/sixth-form-resources/how-to-improve-your-academic-writing.pdf