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!