Dual Enrollment Student and Faculty Resources: Essay Writing

Writing Tips

Resources

The Writing Processes

Academic Writing Traits

Introduction:

Academic writing is not simply about recording ideas or proving learning, it's about creating ideas, creating learning. Writing isn't a product. Writing is a process.Writing a good piece of academic work requires consideration of a wide variety of factors. Also presenting such good work requires skills. Good academic writing depends on a variety of factors such as cohesion, coherence, clarity, reader-friendliness, and plagiarism. Let’s discuss each and every aspect of good academic writing in detail:

Cohesion:

Cohesion refers to connecting your ideas by using grammar. It is referred at the sentence level. Using grammatical concepts like conjunctions, etc. leads to cohesion. Cohesion is an important aspect for good academic writing. Thorough knowledge on grammar is required to perform cohesion. Without cohesion, your ideas cannot be structured for presentation. Lack of cohesion skills might result in user’s lack of comprehending your presentation.Cohesion suggests stability and a degree of predictability. To be cohesive, something should be uniformly, and /or operationally functional and strong. Where the individual parts fit together to make a whole. It is more of an aesthetic quality. Starting from introduction to final conclusion a structured format is required to create flow of ideas.

Coherence:

Coherence is logical connection between your sentences. Apart from grammatical aspects, a new way of presenting information has to be made for readers to gain understanding over your work. This requires knowledge on what you are doing, what concepts have you discussed and how you are going to present. These aspects help you understand the flow. This is referred to at the logical level. Coherence refers to the intellectual quality, internal logic and rationality of the idea, notion, or whatever is being described. It is structural or logical quality. Have a preplanned flow of ideas. Experiment it and produce results.

Clarity:

Clarity is always an important aspect for good academic writing. Without thorough knowledge on the subject of discussion, one cannot present it in a seemingly better way. To achieve clarity, try to understand the subject and it’s aspects. Clarity and precision are two key factors for a good presentation. Achieving precision means accuracy, Clarity is having a broad understanding towards the idea. With these factors, good piece of academic writing can be produced. Read out aloud is an important step in achieving clarity. When starting a paragraph try providing the intended message in the beginning itself. Not having clarity can be reflected when it is read.

Reader Friendliness:

Readers community is the most important consideration for producing any piece of work. Without the readers it is impossible for your work to be endorsed. Always try to present the work with a reader in mind. A reader may be from any background. He may or may not have the required skills to understand your work. Producing a work that is reader friendly is as important as targeting audiences. Try to produce a work that is comprehendible in grammatical and logical aspects. Use simple language etiquette. Don’t try proving your fluency over the language. Make your work universal. Have references if needed for them to gain insights from various sources.

Plagiarism:

One of the most important aspect of good academic writing traits is avoiding plagiarism. Plagiarism is the art of reproducing another person’s work or extracting from your own previous works. Using plagiarised content might lead to severe consequences depending upon your nature of work. Famous writers, poets, researchers have been accused of plagiarism and their works have been rejected/ terminated for a variety of reasons. Plagiarism must be avoided as much as possible. A piece of work with minimal plagiarised content is accepted worldwide and helps in building good writing practices. Try  generating new ideas rather than stating someone’s effort as yours. Avoid extracting sources from the internet or any book that is copyrighted. Generate new ideas and create new pieces of work. This might produce good academic manuscripts with good accreditations.There are various forms of plagiarism like extracting from the internet, word for word extraction without acknowledgment, paraphrasing and so on. Internet has been the source for plagiarism as there is every information needed for any researcher or writer.

Conclusion:

Various aspects of good academic writing have been discussed along with their importance. Cohesion, coherence, clarity and reader friendliness are the key factors to good academic manuscripts. Apart from these avoiding plagiarism is needed for achieving perfection in academic writing. There are a variety of other factors leading to good academic writing but these factors discussed play a pivotal role.