ACADEMIC WRITING : A

SHORT OVERVIEW

Asih Nurakhir

School of Nursing Diponegoro University

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What to learn?
1. Academic writing skills
2. Formal writing: academic writing and informal
writing
3. Common grammatical mistakes in writing

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ACADEMIC WRITING
Academic writing plays a significant role in the field of
higher education. It has been long recognized as an
essential skill university students need to master.
ACADEMIC WRITING is one type of writing used to express
acquired knowledge in a specific subject area.
Such writing tends to be serious in nature and often
demonstrates particular theories or arguments in relation
to a specified discourse.
Students who study in university of various majors of study
will deal with this kind of writing as the primary form of
communication within individual subject disciplines.
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ACADEMIC WRITING
Writing in academic contexts requires students to advance
their own ideas within a framework of domain or discipline
knowledge and engage the reader in academic discourse.
This ability has been one of the factors which determine the
success of the study as revealed by many researches.

Writing for many students, when compared to other skills of

language, i.e. listening, speaking and reading, is not an easy
task. It still becomes one of the most challenging areas for
both teachers and students.

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Academic writing skills

Academic writing skills are very important today.

It is applied in essays, reports, presentations and
research papers
Academic writing presents a polished and
professional image.

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Goals of Academic writing

Seek truth
Argue a point
Propose solutions
Deepen insights
Clarify a theory
Challenge conventional wisdom

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Academic writing skills

a)
b)
c)

Academic writing skills encompass:

Strong composition
Excellent grammar
Consistent stylistic approach

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Academic writing skills

A. Strong composition
- thinking precedes writing
- distilling information from sources and reviewing major
points
- detailed outlines to organize thoughts
- begins with solid planning
B. Excellent grammar
- learn major and minor points of grammar
- spend time practicing writing
- proper use of punctuation, capitalization, etc.
C. Consistent stylistic approach
- method used in writing, e.g. APA, Vancouver,
- it tells how to write numbers, references, citations, etc.
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Formal writing: academic writing

Academic writing refers to particular style of expressions.

Characteristics:
a. Formal tone
b. Use of the 3rd person rather than 1st person perspective
c. clear focus on topic rather than authors opinion
d. precise word choices
e. avoid jargon, slang, abbreviations

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Informal writing

Informal writing is easier and more familiar

Characteristics:
- use of colloquialisms and jargon
- writing in the 1st person or making I statements
- making direct personal statements
- imprecise word choices
- use of abbreviations

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Examples
Formal writing: papers for school/colleges, college essays,
research papers, conference presentations

Informal writing: diary entries, blogs, personal writing,

letters or emails to friends

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PROBLEMS IN ACADEMIC WRITING

Shehadeh (2011) outlines problems of students in writing as the
following:
1. limited knowledge and minimal thematic development (content),
2. loose connection and sequencing of ideas (organization),

3. significant problems in the use of complex constructions, frequent errors in

agreement, number, tense, negation, word order, articles, pronouns, prepositions,
and frequent sentence fragments (grammar),
4. limited range of vocabulary, frequent word errors, inappropriate choice and usage
of words, and frequent translation based errors (vocabulary), and
5. frequent spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing errors (mechanics).

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Common Grammatical Mistakes

Run on sentences with two or more complete thoughts
without proper punctuations between clauses.
Use of fragments, incomplete thoughts that lack either a S
or a V
Using two negatives in one sentence

Using misplaced modifiers to modify parts of sentences

Confusing its with its and other possessive apostrophe
errors
Subject Verb disagreement
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