Academic Writing

Academic Writing

Academic writing is one kind of writing. From its name, we can get the point that this kind of writing is applied for academic community, such as teachers, lecturers, and students. There are many kinds of academic writings for example thesis, article, report, essay, and many others. It is very important to know how to make an academic writing because students of universities need it to finish their school. In U.S., English Department Writing Lab has been made since 1960s to help the students-writers (Thonus, 2002). Many students think that academic writing is like an alien form of literacy because academic writing has some requirements. Two of them are using the idea of self and there is data as explained below.

The first requirement of academic writing is using the idea of self. Academic writing is a kind of writing that involves an objective exploration of ideas that transcends the individual (Hyland, 2002a). Don’t try to cheat idea or redouble an effort of other people. When writer does this, the reputation will be questionable. We have to be creative and write a new idea. In university, an academic writing will be rejected if the idea same as another idea. To get a new idea is very difficult. So that, try to watch whatever around the environment. Try to focus and look at the problem around you, such as social problems, education problems, healthy problems or politic problems. Then, think what we should do to solve the problem. When you get an idea write it soon because when you canceled it, it will obstruct your idea. Never think about other things, just focus to your idea. Develop the idea as wide as you can and don’t try to edit it. Remember to get the own idea is difficult so never wasting time when you get it. Other way to get new idea is making design. It will help the writers to imagine what we will write in our academic writings (Lillis, 2003).

The second requirement of academic writing must have data. There are some steps to get data. The first is read many references. Book and internet are good media to get data. Read as much as you can. It aims to strengthen your arguments. The second step is do research. We can do research by doing experiment or asking the society. In asking society, we have to use communicative questions and commands (Thompson, 2001). Research is very important because writer’s arguments in academic writing have to be made with expected procedural and citational support and framed to project suitable and plausibility (Hyland, 2002b).

From explanation above, we can conclude that academic writing is one kind of writing that applied for academic community. It has many requirements. Two of them are using idea of self and need data. Academic writing needs creativity. It will be unacceptable if there is redouble idea in our writing text. Doing research is very important, too. It will help writers to get important data for the writing. We can read books or ask the society to get it. Research also will help the writers in selecting words so that readers are drawn in, influenced and persuaded (Hyland, 2002c). With these requirements, academic writing will be acceptable in society.

References:

Hyland, K. (2002). Option of identity in academic writing. ELT Journal, 55(4), 351-358. Retrieved from http://203.72.145.166/ELT/files/56-4-1.pdf.

Hyland, K. (2002). Directives: Argument and engagement in academic writing. Applied Linguistics, 23(2), 215-239. Retrieved from http://www2.caes.hku.hk/keyhyland/files/2010/12/Directives-Applied-ling.pdf.

Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1091-1112. Retrieved from http://www2.caes.hku.hk/keyhyland/files/2010/12/invisibility.jop­_.pdf.

Lillis, T. (2003). Student writing as ‘academic literacies’: Drawing on bakhtin to move from critique to design. Language and Education, 17(3), 192-207. Retrieved from http://www.writing.ucsb.edu/wrconf08/Pdf_Articles/Lillis_Article2.pdf.

Thompson, G. (2001). Interaction in academic writing: Learning to argue with the reader. Applied Linguistics, 22(1), 58-78. Retrieved from http://biblioteca.ugroo.mx/hemeroteca/applied_linguistics/full_text/Volume-22-01-March-2001/220058.pdf.

Thonus, T. (2002). Tutor and student assessments of academic writing tutorials: What is “success”?. Assessing Writing, 8, 110-134. Retrieved from https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/1733/1/Thonus2002.pdf.