Academic writing Essay

Academic writing is a vital skill for university student. Analyse the necessary elements of successful academic writing

Course:Academic writing

Teacher: Gray Sandra

Student Name:Jiang Chu

Student Number:JIACP1304

Word count:809

Academic writing currently has been significant part of the study. According to Murray and Rowena (2006) academic writing is that set of conventions people see in a thesis or a published paper in disciplines, a definition that becomes more precise once people scrutinize examples of published writing in the target journals (Murray & Rowena,2006). Academic writing is an assessment tool, writing is indirectly encouraging students to read widely, think critically, improve communication skills, the most important things is to develop a certain level of competence and professionalism needed for the students future career (Gillett,2009). There are necessary elements of successful academic writing, for example: good grammar, clear structure, critical thinking, wide vocabulary, good planning ,adequate research about the topic of the essay and good references. This essay will mainly discuss the important role of research in academic writing, following this it will show clear structure is absolutely necessary to good academic writing. In addition, this essay will analyse why critical thinking is extremely important for academic writing. Finally, this essay will discuss why grammar is also important to academic writing.

Research plays an important role in academic writing. According to Gillett (2009) research is an important activity in any study and helps develop student learning and knowledge of the subject, whatever type of writing students have to do (Gillett,2009). The reason why research is important to academic writing is because research can bring some new information which may have not come entirely from ideas in peoples heads. For example it is necessary to provide background information, to support authors arguments, give strong evidence or give a fuller explanation to support the authors opinion, help the author understand the depth and complexity of the academic topic. Most importantly, the author can understand the assessment criteria. Therefore good research is a strong foundation for successful academic writing.

In addition, clear structure is absolutely necessary to good academic writing. Structure means both the way a piece of writing is organized and more importantly what work it is doing (Creme & Lea,2008).It would be foolish to maintain that all writing must be planned, but it does not seem unreasonable to assert that good writers must be able to plan (Berelter & Scardamalla , 1987). Clear structure constructs the relationships between different ideas and keeps coherence in academic writing. Coherence is that quality that makes the text stick together and gives it a sense of flow and unity (Murray & Beglar ,2009). If a text has been carefully planned and is coherent as a result, then the reader will be able to follow the logic and understand the article. If, on the other hand, a text is incoherent, then it will be hard to follow the writer’s main ideas. Consequently, clear structure is probably the most important element in achieving clarity in writing.

Besides research and structure, critical thinking is also extremely important element in academic writing. Nash (1990) clearly points out: the student who describe the fact, with no analyse, gets poor marks; the student who analyse topic clearly and have compare and contrast in the article, gets high marks. In other words, critical thinking and writing is a useful skill in academic writing. The reason why critical thinking is extremely important, is because critical thinking can help a student to comprehensively analyse the topic. For instance, if a student writes critically, it will compare and contrast arguments and ideas and find advantages and disadvantages of solutions to problems. Most importantly, all of the points

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