Tips For College Students Looking to Perfect Their Academic Writing Style
As college students, you might find yourself in a confusing situation when you receive assignments, specifically in terms of the structure and how to present the required information. When crafting an academic piece of writing, it is essential to go step by step to ensure you don’t miss out on anything important your professor might expect in the journal article, case study, report, thesis, or other academic documents.
Familiarize Yourself with The Types Of Academic Writing
You might already know the basics of academic writing, but in the advanced stages of your degree, you might need to combine different types of academic writing styles to produce text that achieves several effects that are unique to each style. The four common types of academic writing include:
- Descriptive writing: This type of writing is focused on providing facts and verified statistics to identify, record, report, define, and summarize data.
- Analytical writing: This type of writing is focused on evaluating the facts, statistics, and information to identify commonality for ease of classification, analysis, comparison, and contrast of data
- Persuasive writing: This type of writing is focused on making the reader agree with your point of view by arguing and discussing the data to arrive at claims supporting your argument
- Critical writing: This type of writing is focused on including more than one point of view for an in-depth analysis that successfully critiques or debates a topic with relevant data.
Spend Time in Selecting A Topic
When selecting a topic, you need to consider certain aspects. Firstly, whether the topic has been assigned to you or the topic selection lies with you, you need to think about if you’re going to approaching the topic from a broad or narrow perspective. This process is easier if you’re already assigned a topic, but the freedom to choose a topic certainly has its merits in terms of selecting a topic relevant to your area of interest and expertise. Research can effectively help you narrow down your topic and approach by allowing you to evaluate the available information while determining what your take will be on the topic.
Create An Outline
The topic and the direction and stance you’re taking on it defines the outline of the entire piece. Before you can create an outline, you need to brainstorm to determine the most credible points that can contribute positively to your argument or piece of writing. The research you conducted during the topic selection phase can be extremely beneficial during this step, and by listing everything point by point, you can organize your thoughts so the writing process becomes easily manageable.
Systematically Write Your Document
Once you have the foundation laid out, you can begin writing the document. While there is no correct method of writing an academic piece, it is easier to start by crafting a thesis statement or research question related to your topic to identify the direction of your writing. With the direction decided, you can begin writing the body of your work by focusing on each main idea stated in the outline and producing relevant facts, figures, examples, and verified opinions to support your statements.
After completing the body paragraphs, you can begin with the introduction as you should now have an idea about exactly what you have discussed in the piece, and therefore, you can introduce it properly by using attention-grabbing techniques such as quotes and facts to create interest. The conclusion is one of the final steps and producing your academic writing, and it should restate ideas from your body paragraphs without introducing any new information to wrap up the piece neatly.
You might think your writing journey ends with the conclusion paragraph; however, proofreading and editing are very important to add the finishing touches to your academic writing piece. If you find it difficult to evaluate your piece of work from an unbiased standpoint, Edit911 offers premium editing services that will ensure your writing is smooth and error-free to meet your high standards. Our academic proofreading and editing services evaluate grammar, structure, context, and readability with the help of our professional editors so you can submit a well-written piece of work. Get in touch with them today for their academic editing services!
