Academic writing in a report, essay, dissertation or thesis often requires different qualities to other forms of writing. Unlike the average reader who may be reading for pleasure, academic readers read academic writing for facts and evidence. So, an academic writer must adopt a different approach to writing.
We work alongside a wide range of writers with very different writing styles. Experience of working with this wide variety of writers reveals that some produce clearer texts than others. Although a lot of this clairty could be attributed to a writer's articulation and vocabulary, its often the case that clear writers are also able to organise their writing in better ways. So let's take a look at this in more detail.
Problems often arise for non-native English language users when they try to apply the rules that they used to learn English to everything that they encounter later on. Languages are always evolving, often this is a uniform way that conforms with common rules, but sometimes they evolve to push everyday usage away from the rules that they were built upon.
All academics and students at university will have to write a literature review at some point. In a nutshell, a literature review is an attempt to create a complete account of what has been published on a topic. The literature review is usually placed near the beginning of the academic writing in a research paper, essay, research report or thesis.
Active and passive forms of sentence structure can completely alter a reader's understanding of the same message. Active sentences tend to be more forthcoming with their meaning, whereas passive sentences aren’t as straightforward.
A study published on the Science Dailywebsite discusses research carried out at Northumbria University. The research looked at how native speakers interpreted active and passive sentences. Dr Dabrowska’s comments on the results of the study included:
We have spent our entire careers working with English language development. Each editor has a master-level qualification in a linguistics related subject (minimum) and experience as an English tutor at a university.