When starting out on an academic writing journey as a postgrad, you are drawing on your years of apprenticeship as an undergraduate student in engaging with scholarly content, interpreting it, and formulating ideas.
The mastery of academic writing is as much part of a Masters curriculum as your mastery of your chosen area of specialisation and research. Now is the time to really hone those writing skills and demonstrate that you can not only understand literature, theory and the data that you have collected, but also present it coherently according to the expectations of a long tradition of scholarly communication.
It is probably easiest to start off with an examination of what academic writing is NOT, before getting in to details about what defines academic writing, so here is a list (incomplete) of different writing styles and types, looking at their purposes and conventions.
What academic writing is NOT:
Type | Conventions | Purpose | Style and tone |
Poetry | The most dense type of writing. Form should follow function. Sound, rhythm and metre contribute as much to the meaning as the words in the text do. | Delighting the reader through the process of discovering layers of meaning. | Extremely concise. Avoids abstraction. Relies heavily on figurative language such as metaphor. May deliberately break language rules for effect. |
Narrative prose (fiction) | Follows a linear structure that tells an imaginative story. | Entertaining the reader with captivating characters and series of events, often using tension for effect. | Often uses figurative language to appeal to the reader's imagination or emotions. May be formal or casual. |
Journalism | Follows a linear structure (usually an inverted pyramid that starts with the most important ideas and then adds progressively increasing levels of detail). | Informing the reader about important events. | Neutral. May use figurative language to illustrate a point. |
Editorial | Transparent about bias or objectivity. | Interpreting important events, or opinions usually with a privileged insight (such as expertise in a particular area). | May be neutral or biased, and use a wide range of tones and styles. |
Philosophical | Logical flow and coherence (although this is not always the case). Subjectivity is typically assumed. | Presenting ideas about meaning, how meaning is made, and how we interpret our existence. | High level of abstraction. May use figurative language to illustrate concepts. |
Advertising | Uses emotive language to convince or to create desire. | Persuading people to buy stuff. | Strong appeals to emotion. |
Pseudo-scientific | Provides confirmatory evidence for hypotheses or theories, in the false guise of objectivity and the scientific method. | Persuading people to believe claims for which there is little evidence (e.g. conspiracy theories). | Frequently uses devious appeals to emotion or logical fallacies. Hyperbole and unequivocal statements are common. |
Narrative prose (non-fiction) | Follows a linear structure that presents a sequence of facts. | Helping people to understand factual topics like science or history. | Generally neutral. |
The examples above are of course generalisations and oversimplifications. There are overlaps between some of them, and also some overlaps with good academic writing practice. In many ways, academic writing is a form of non-fiction narrative prose, but it does have some distinguishing features.
So, what are the ideals of academic writing?
Firstly, let's examine the purpose of academic writing.
It aligns very closely with the scientific process: it tells the story of the discovery of new information (the narrative of your research from the development of your research questions to your findings and conclusions), and exposes that information to review.
Academic writing is expected to be original, in the sense that it deals with information that was not previously known, or the novel application of theory to data. It is also expected to engage constructively with previous knowledge in the research area - partly to fulfil the requirement of originality - and to have some bearing on theory, either developing new theories, testing existing theories, or using theories as a basis or framework for exploration of data. On top of that, you should demonstrate that you can interpret information skillfully and adequately.
Whereas originality in figurative writing (such as poetry, fiction or advertising) relies on unique and unexpected ways of saying things that make an impression on the reader, originality in academic writing has to do with the originality of the data that we find in research. Figurative writing frequently breaks with convention in order to demonstrate originality (such as the poems of E.E. Cummings, who deliberately flouted the rules of punctuation and syntax to create a new way of representing time and space in language, or Virginia Woolf who created a character in Orlando: a biography who lives more than 300 years and changes gender in the middle of the novel). In contrast, such shenanigans with language and logic would not make much sense in academic writing, and for academia we tend to reserve the more imaginative part of our work for coming up with our research ideas, finding interesting theories, and finding compelling ways to present our data.
In order to meet the objectives of telling the story of your research and exposing the research to review, there are narrative and stylistic conventions for academic writing that have established themselves over the years. Deviating from these conventions is by no means wrong, but doing so requires a very good motivation. At the very least, it is critically important that you demonstrate that you have covered all of the steps of the research process in a logical order, and that you present the results of your research in a way that is consistent with your methodology and the requirements for reliability and validity (quantitative) or trustworthiness and dependability (qualitative) of evidence.
Narrative conventions help us to ensure that our story is clearly understood. If your presentation of your story is muddled or overcomplicated, you risk misrepresenting your research journey, and your reader may accuse your research of not being methodologically sound.
Logical flow operates at two levels:
The Golden Thread that links your research objectives, research questions, literature review, conceptual framework, methods, instrument design, data interpretation, findings and conclusions. This central theme should be evident throughout every section of your work, and is helped along by the standard structure of a dissertation or thesis.
The internal coherence at the micro-level that links sentences and ideas, and one section or paragraph to another. What is meant by this is that you should not be jumping around from topic to topic, but rather exploring each topic in turn, using one idea as a springboard for another. (I promise a separate post on this, but here are some solid guidelines in the meanwhile).
Objectivity and neutrality
Academic writing's foundation in science established the conventions of objectivity and neutrality. However, in the Social Sciences we can afford to be a bit more flexible. Much depends on your chosen research paradigm. The standard scientific positivist paradigm with quantitative methods requires the researcher to do everything they can to avoid bias, but some research designs, paradigms and theories, such as autoethnography, Critical Theory and action research may actually demand that the researcher be biased, and you are expected to reflect on your bias and/or your positionality if you are using these frameworks.
Opinions are frequently important in research, including your own, but if you are presenting opinions or interpretations, you must ensure that they are marked as such, and not presented as facts or evidence.
However, although objectivity is not essential, neutral tone remains important.
Some examples of inappropriate tone:
Casual/colloquial: Using contractions (won't for will not, can't for cannot, it's for it is), slang (on fleek, gross, lit, smallanyana) or other colloquialisms (wanna, gonna).
Imperious: Trying to sound like you are the world's best expert on the subject and to make your reader feel like a fool.
Ostentatious: Using very long and complicated sentences with lots of "big" words (utilise instead of use; perambulate instead of walk; discombombulated instead of confused); trying to impress the reader with your vocabulary or obfuscate with jargon.
Using fancy language may have impressed your high school English teacher, but it is going to annoy the reader of an academic text. What does impress in academic writing is simplicity and clarity. Remember, you are not trying to persuade your reader that you are clever; you are trying to persuade them that you have done a thorough job of researching your topic.
Humour is not illegal and can be refreshing, but it is wise for a novice researcher to avoid it.
Stylistic objectives
Clarity: Above all, academic writing should be clear. There should be no ambiguity in what you are saying. Figurative writing can celebrate the ability of language to use one phrase to say many things at once with techniques like puns, metaphors and irony, but you do not want to run the risk of your reader misinterpreting anything in your academic writing. When citing, you need to make sure that if you are presenting multiple ideas, the source of each idea must be clear. The example below is what I call a "scope of reference error", in which part of the statement - the author's choice of meta-ethnography - is not attributable to the cited source.
Meta-ethnography is said to be the best-established technique when synthesising qualitative data because of its interpretive and inductive abilities and was therefore chosen for this study (Britte et al., 2002:210).It is ambiguous because the reader could be led to believe that the authors of the cited text had chosen that research design for the citing researcher's study, which is not the case.
Precision: Even if you are doing a qualitative study, you should aim to quantify statements wherever possible. Vague generalisations like "A lot of people believe that libraries are useful" are meaningless in academic writing. How many is "a lot"? What are the criteria for "usefulness"? If you want to make a statement like this, you should find a source that demonstrates that the majority of people surveyed in a population agreed that libraries contribute in specific ways to their lives, and what those ways are (education, leisure, safety, community participation, etc.)
Simplicity: I like to work with the heuristic that if your grandmother would understand what you have written (barring unavoidable jargon and complex theory), you have done a good job of scholarly communication. Use plain language wherever possible, limit yourself to one concept per sentence and a topic statement in each paragraph.
Conciseness: Compress to impress. You do want to be thorough and you want to give a full account of your research, but that does not mean that you have to use more words than necessary. Eliminate unnecessary repetition and meaningless phrases (like "in this day and age"), stay focused on your topic, synthesise where possible.
Organisation: Clear structure is crucial. Using headings and sub-headings will help you to guide the reader through your narrative, while also helping you to stay on topic for each section.
Write for your reader, not for yourself
Once you have your first draft written, it is a really good idea to ask yourself "What does my reader want to know?" before diving in to revising that draft for review by your supervisor. In creative writing you can indulge your own artistry, but the academic reader is not wanting to be entertained; they are reading your work to find out if you have conducted your research in a disciplined way. What is going to make them happy? You need to provide them with evidence of that discipline. They want substantiated arguments. They want to know what your research is about, how you went about it, and what you found. Meeting this need may require you to restructure your content, revise for clarity, change your tone, and of course correct any errors in grammar and spelling that you might have made.
Third or first person?
In the Social Sciences we work in different paradigms that have different expectations about the visibility of the researcher in their work and their epistemological position.
Bearing in mind that your tone should be neutral, you may, if you are working outside of a positivist or post-positivist paradigm, refer to yourself in the first person (I, me). Most of the time you should try to keep your academic writing impersonal ("a qualitative approach was considered most suitable for this study"), which sometimes requires more use of the passive voice than plain language guidelines suggest, but referring to yourself when presenting your motivations or your findings is sometimes unavoidable.
You will have to choose between referring to yourself as "this researcher/ the researcher" and "I", and in this you should be guided by how distant your research paradigm is from the positivist tradition. Whichever you choose, you must ensure that you are consistent: do not refer to yourself as "I" in Chapter 1, but "the researcher" in your analysis and conclusion.
But, but... What about my creativity?
If you are a creative and imaginative person, you may well find that the predictable structure and neutral tone of academic writing are restrictive. As I said before, the creative thrill of research lies in conceptualising and executing your research project, rather than knuckling down to writing a dissertation. Writing it up for review and examination may seem quite boring and dull if you are accustomed to florid and emotional writing. But that does not mean that there is no room in academic writing for an elegant turn of phrase or an imaginative way of presenting your data. Writing concisely with clarity and purpose takes skill and craft. The content may be created and structured for you, but packaging it so that it delights the reader by the ease with which they can understand it, the speed at which they can interpret your arguments, and the insight with which you interpreted your data, can be just as much fun as coming up with a teasing metaphor in a poem or penning a viciously spiteful letter to your ex.
A final word: some contrasts
The following are examples of styles of writing that some students may try to emulate when tackling academic writing. Each has a distinctive element that distinguishes it from good academic writing, because its purpose was not academic in the sense of academic writing.
Sounding clever
Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, "The world has this in it, and this, but not that." For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.- Ludwig Wittgenstein. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (5.61)
In this philosophical text Wittgenstein is dealing with metaphysical concepts, rather than with empirical evidence for a research question. The language sounds very intellectually impressive because it is highly abstract, but trying to replicate it it would not impress an examiner because they are not looking for you to show off your command of the twists and turns of pure thought, they are looking for the narrative of your research. Although the tone is neutral, the sentence structure is necessarily quite complex because the language is self-referential and the concepts being dealt with are impossible to explain in material terms. Whereas Wittgenstein was aiming for truth, you are aiming for evidence.
Sounding literary
By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair; that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old form, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did in every part of life without innovation. That, some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill commonwealth's-men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of the country.- Jonathan Swift. 1726. Gulliver's Travels.
This is the type of "Grand" English that we are often taught is "good" writing. There is no denying that Jonathan Swift was a great writer, but this flowery style with long, complex sentences, genteel phrasing and roundabout descriptions is not only archaic, it was also intended to sound pretentious, even in the context of the early 18th Century's mannered style. Jonathan Swift was a satirist, and he deliberately wanted to portray the fictional narrator of Gulliver's Travels (Lemuel Gulliver himself) as a stuffy, ostentatious and vain man, the type who believed that the British were a superior nation destined to dominate the world with their knowledge and technology, hence the pompous tone. Aiming to write in this elevated literary style will alienate your reader, because you will come across as just as conceited and prejudiced as Gulliver himself.
Sounding critical
There is no doubt that the colour question in South African politics was originally introduced for economic reasons. The leaders of the white community had to create some kind of barrier between blacks and whites so that whites could enjoy privileges at the expense of blacks and still feel free to give a moral justification for the obvious exploitation that pricked even the hardest of white consciences.- Steven Biko. 1979. Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity' in I Write What I Like: Selected Writings, ed. Aelred Stubbs. Harper & Row.
We are all inspired by the topics about which we feel passionate. Critical modes of research often provide those of us with a strong sense of social justice with a channel for this enthusiasm. There is nothing wrong with Steven Biko's statements as they stand as critical reflections on reality in a political pamphlet, and his insights would serve perfectly well as citations to substantiate assertions that you make in your research. However, when making your own statements and drawing your own conclusions in academic writing, you are not producing a political pamphlet or editorial. No matter how strongly convinced you are of the rightness of your ideas, you are still required to identify opinions as such, or to provide empirical evidence for your claims.
Sounding persuasive
[Source deliberately withheld to avoid indexing]
The journalistic nature of this content is obvious, but I think that there are two things about it that are important to point out. The first is the appeal to authority and apparent foundation in research. The title of Doctor carries a certain amount of weight and trust; this person is presented to us as an expert and the information is therefore assumed to be based on empirical research. The second is the appeal to emotion. Note the repeated use of the loaded word "killer", the hyperbole ("most outspoken, bravest, rips through") and other emotive language that is used to persuade and convince. Although the article superficially professes to scientific claims, the style and tone are anything but neutral. Indeed, what follows after this is an advertisement for the extremely expensive and unregulated "wellness" treatments that are sold by Dr McCullough's company. The objective here is to appeal to emotions to persuade the reader to buy products, not to share research.
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