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Concept
Academic writing
Summary
Academic writing or scholarly writing is nonfiction writing produced as part of academic work in accordance with the standards and disciplines of each academic subject, including:
Reports on empirical fieldwork or research in facilities for the natural sciences or social sciences,
Monographs in which scholars analyze culture, propose new theories, or
Develop interpretations from archives,
as well as undergraduate versions of all of these.
Though the tone, style, content, and organization of academic writing vary across genres and across publication methods, nearly all academic writing shares a relatively formal prose register, frequent reference to other academic work, and the use of fairly stable rhetorical moves to define the scope of the project, situate it in the relevant research, and to advance a new contribution.
Academic writing often features prose register that is conventionally characterized by "evidence...that the writer(s) have been persistent, open-minded, and disciplined in the study"; that prioritizes "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:
a balance of caution and certainty, or a balance of hedging and boosting;
explicit cohesion through a range of cohesive ties and moves; and
compression, or dense noun phrases to add detail rather than more dependent clauses.
The stylistic means of achieving these conventions can differ by academic discipline, which helps explain the distinctive sounds of, for example, writing in history versus engineering or physics versus philosophy. Biber and Gray suggested that there are significant differences with regards to complexity in academic writing in humanities versus science, with humanities writing often focused on structural elaboration, and sciences, on structural compression.
Official source
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