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What is #academic writing?

Academic writing or scholarly writing refers primarily to nonfiction writing that is produced as part of academic work in accordance with the standards of a particular academic subject or discipline, including:

· reports on empirical fieldwork or research in facilities for the natural sciences or social sciences,

· monographs in which scholars analyse culture, propose new theories, or develop interpretations from archives, as well as undergraduate versions of all of these.

Academic writing typically uses a more formal tone and follows specific conventions. Central to academic writing is its intertextuality, or an engagement with existing scholarly conversations through meticulous citing or referencing of other academic work, which underscores the writer's participation in the broader discourse community. However, the exact style, content, and organisation of academic writing can vary depending on the specific genre and publication method. Despite this variation, all academic writing shares some common features, including a commitment to intellectual integrity, the advancement of knowledge, and the rigorous application of disciplinary methodologies.

Challenges to scholarly writing and strategies to overcome them are systematised by Angelova-Stanimirova and Lambovska in

Academic style

Academic writing often features a prose register that is conventionally characterised by "evidence...that the writer(s) have been persistent, open-minded and disciplined in the study"; that prioritises "reason over emotion or sensual perception"; and that imagines a reader who is "coolly rational, reading for information, and intending to formulate a reasoned response."

Three linguistic patterns that correspond to these goals across fields and genres include the following:

1. a balance of caution and certainty, or a balance of hedging and boosting;

2. explicit cohesion through a range of cohesive ties and moves; and

3. The use of compressed noun phrases, rather than dependent clauses, for adding detail.

The stylistic means of achieving these conventions will differ by academic discipline, seen, for example, in the distinctions between writing in history versus engineering, or writing in physics versus philosophy. Biber and Grey propose further differences in the complexity of academic writing between disciplines, seen, for example, in the distinctions between writing in the humanities versus writing in the sciences. In the humanities, academic style is often seen in elaborated, complex texts, while in the sciences, academic style is often seen in highly structured, concise texts. These stylistic differences are thought to be related to the types of knowledge and information being communicated in these two broad fields.

One theory that attempts to account for these differences in writing is known as "discourse communities".

Criticism

Academic style has often been criticised for being too full of jargon and hard to understand by the general public. In 2022, Joelle Renstrom argued that the COVID-19 pandemic has hurt academic writing and that many scientific articles now "contain more jargon than ever, which encourages misinterpretation, political spin, and a declining public trust in the scientific process."

Discourse community

A discourse community is a group of people that shares mutual interests and beliefs. "It establishes limits and regularities...who may speak, what may be spoken, and how it is to be said; in addition, [rules] prescribe what is true and false, what is reasonable and what foolish, and what is meant and what not."

The concept of a discourse community is vital to academic writers across all disciplines, for the academic writer's purpose is to influence how their community understands its field of study: whether by maintaining, adding to, revising, or contesting what that community regards as "known" or "true." To effectively communicate and persuade within their field, academic writers are motivated to adhere to the conventions and standards set forth