Academic writing is a crucial skill for each researcher and academic. Learn my tested secrets that will help you improve your academic writing today!

If you’re about to start your postgraduate degree, you’re about to find out what academic writing is. If you’re already deep in your PhD or even later in your academic career, you already know that academic writing is a completely different beast than any other type of literary writing. 

I do love writing academic work, using passive voice, and explaining the fruits of my critical thinking in the form of scholarly articles. Bot not many people do. 

As a matter of fact, most people hate academic writing and find it daunting, overwhelming, and even frustrating. 

But you know what? As a non-native English speaker, I can confidently tell you that it doesn’t need to be the case. I did struggle a lot with writing at the very beginning of my Master degree. I wanted my writing to be perfect and usually spent double the time necessary to write something up to polish the texts I develop. I was thinking that because I’m a non-native speaker, I’m probably going to make more mistakes and my writing will be difficult to understand or inaccurate – so I spent even more time rewriting my academic work. 

But as I started peer-reviewing the work of others, I did pay attention to their academic writing style. Having reviewed hundreds of academic journal papers and other texts from across academic disciplines, I noted one thing – everyone struggles with academic writing. Regardless of whether I reviewed the work of native or non-native English speakers, they made exactly the same mistakes in terms of language, grammar, clarity and conciseness. 

And then it hit me – here’s the bit thanks to which you’ll significantly improve academic writing. 

I always thought that academic writing requires complex structure, elaborate language and passive voice, strict and scientific format. But I bet you’ll agree with me that when you actually read work written in such a way, for example in a journal article, you feel that you read a lot and learnt absolutely nothing. 

I know many people may disagree with me on this. But in my view, using complex language and structures is actually against the main purpose of academic writing – to communicate knowledge!

My best advice on how you can improve academic writing? Keep it simple and focus on presenting the key messages in your academic text.

What is academic writing? 

Academic writing is a formal way of communicating your research findings and knowledge that you produced in your research with your academic community. 

It’s usually geared towards presenting information in a clear and concise manner. This applies regardless of the fact if you’re writing assignments, journal papers, thesis or other academic texts. 

I want you to realise that academic writing skill is one of the most important skill that you need to develop a successful academic career. 

Why do we need academic writing?

Mastering academic writing will help you clearly share your research ideas with others, especially those who are out of your research area. 

As academics and researchers, we tend to use academic writing on a daily basis. 

Why? 

Because one of the main purposes of academic writing is to objectively communicate our research ideas with other researchers.

Let me tell you this. If you don’t master writing academic texts, your research won’t achieve the impact it deserves. I don’t want to be negative here – that’s the truth. Even groundbreaking research won’t be published if it isn’t written in an easy to understand manner. 

But worry not. I’ve spent countless hours trying to work out how to improve academic writing myself and I’ve come up with my own writing process. 

Today, I want to share 11 academic writing secrets that will help you improve your writing skills and get others to easily understand your research. 

Ready to learn? Yes? Let’s go! 

Academic Writing Secret #1: Style guide is your saviour 

Where do you start when you write any type of academic text? A style guide! 

Regardless of whether you write your PhD thesis, literature review or academic paper, your university or publisher may have specific requirements for the writing style that you should follow. 

If you cannot find a specific style guide for your university or publisher, you can always refer to the most common style guides for academic writing, such as the ones by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Amerian Psychological Association (APA) or the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). 

The key to implementing this secret is to select one style and use it consistently.  

Academic Writing Secret #2: Avoid plagiarism at all cost

Plagiarism is the number #1 enemy of academic writing. Even if you apply the correct writing style, your work won’t be of high academic quality if you copy-paste from others or even your own work. 

In many cases, any sort of plagiarism will be checked by the editorial team or your examination panel. If they find a high degree of similarity of already published academic work, they will reject your paper/project. Therefore, you really want to avoid plagiarism at all costs. 

Want to learn more about plagiarism? Or want to find out ways to avoid it? If you answered yes to any of these questions, check out our session on What is plagiarism and how to avoid it now! 

Academic Writing Secret #3: Always refer to original sources

This build on the previous secret. When you describe the current state of the art when writing your literature review or research proposal, it’s natural that you’ll use academic work that has already been published. 

The trick is that to improve your academic writing and the impact of your texts, you need to always refer to the original sources. This primarily means that you need to refer to the papers that you cite. 

However, there is also another take on this secret. When you read existing literature, you may have noted that there are some inconsistencies in citations. For example, you read a paper and found an interesting piece of information that was supported with a citation to another paper. But when you read that another paper, you find that the same piece of information is associated with yet another paper.

And so on.

This is frustrating, isn’t it? Therefore, the key to this secret is to use cite the ORIGINAL source that was first to present the piece of information you want to cite in your work. Your readers will appreciate this! 

Want help with managing your references? Check the review of literature review tools that can help you speed up the writing process. 

Academic Writing Secret #4: Make your main idea clear as soon as possible

You need to give your reader the reason to read the full text as soon as possible. That’s why you need to tell them what your work is about as soon as reasonably possible in your documents. 

For research papers, proposals or dissertations, there are specific sections that are meant to present your main idea.

Reviewers and examiners will be looking for this in that sections so make sure you understand how to structure your academic texts and where to include information about the main idea of your work. 

Want to learn what to include in each section of an academic paper? Check out our Paper Writing Masterclass!

Academic Writing Secret #5: Ensure your story flows 

Achieving the so-called logical flow of information is one of the most difficult things to achieve in writing academic texts. 

That’s because our brains don’t always work in an organised and linear manner. When we try to write our research down, it seems tedious, disorganised and even ugly sometimes. 

But it doesn’t need to be a problem.  In the Paper Writing Masterclass, I present a simple yet effective framework that you can apply to develop the story for your research paper. The secret is to develop an outline for your research paper before you actually start writing anything! 

Academic Writing Secret #6: Consistency 

This is one of the most frustrating and annoying things I find in the current literature. 

Lack of consistency in nomenclature in your academic work distracts and frustrates people who read your work. It may even give an impression that you haven’t done a sufficient amount of editing before submitting your draft. 

What I mean by lack of consistency is using different names for the same framework/concept/technology etc. 

The same applies to consistently using the units, abbreviations, nomenclature, variable symbols and so on. 

The secret is to spend a sufficient amount of time at the beginning of your research to decide on these things and keep them consistent throughout your project.

If you’re completing a PhD degree, this saves you a significant amount of time. Why you may think – well examiners will definitely ask you to use uniform nomenclature, variable symbols and so on in the final version of your thesis. 

Consistency is key to academic success! 

Academic Writing Secret #7: Consider who will read your work

Have you ever considered who will read your work? I didn’t during the early stages of my PhD. I assumed that people will be interested in the same pieces of information as I am.

Therefore, I wrote my early papers as if I was writing them for myself. The result? An embarrassing number of rejections nearly made me question whether I’ve got what it takes to do my PhD!

To improve academic writing, you need to consider who will read your work and why. I discuss this at length in the Paper Writing Masterclass.

Academic Writing Secret #8: Avoid jargon where possible 

This builds on the previous secret. Depending on who will read your work, they may or may not have an understanding of your research area. 

If they do work in your area, it’s likely that they will understand jargon and abbreviations. But when your work gets in hands of people who don’t know the specificity of your research area, they may struggle to understand what you’re talking about. 

I always avoid using jargon, at least in my abstracts and conclusions, as I expect these may be read by people from outside of my research area. I strongly encourage my students and you to do so too. 

Academic Writing Secret #9: Avoid using difficult and fancy words 

I’m not sure what’s the origin of this, but some people actually think that academic writing involves using difficult and fancy words to improve the quality of your work.

Some people use it to elevate the gravity of their work. But you know what? Spending hours using Thesaurus to come up with more elaborate synonyms for your academic work will be counterintuitive. Why? Because when you have your readers in mind, they may find it difficult to read your text. 

Academic writing doesn’t need to be complicated. I use plain language whenever possible because the main purpose of any academic text is to efficiently convey research ideas. I’m sure this helped me to publish my work! 

Academic Writing Secret #10: Do not use contractions

As I mentioned before, I’m not a native English speaker. But the first thing that I learnt about academic writing is that you shouldn’t use contractions. I was told that using contractions makes your work appear informal. Some people also believe that using contractions may weaken your statements.  

Whether that is correct or not, I don’t know. But what I noted is that the reviewers, editors and examiners will raise this after reading your work and will ask you not to use contractions. This is often mentioned in the language style guide. 

Academic Writing Secret #11: Keep your sentences short

At last, but not least using too long sentences is a problem for many of us. It used to be my problem too, because of the complex structures used in my mother tongue. 

The issue is that when your sentences are too long, your writing lacks focus. Your sentences may present just too much information at once. This makes your work difficult to read. My advice? Use short sentences instead with a single intent – to inform, discuss, demonstrate or compare. 

Conclusion

Developing your own writing process for academic documents is crucial to achieving success in your career. It’s important for your job applications, research proposals, academic papers, dissertation and so on. 

It may appear challenging at first, especially if you’re a non-native English speaker. But worry not. I’m too and I had to learn everything from the scratch! By being persistent, I understood the key principles of academic writing and developed my own writing process. In this article, I shared with you my top 11 secrets to writing academic texts that I use on a daily basis. 

I trust you found it useful! If you want to learn more about writing academic papers, check out our Hub for free resources and affordable Paper Writing Masterclass