The three main sources of guidance…” such
The Importance of Academic Writing
For centuries, the human species has been mastering the art of writing, as it is everywhere whether you think so or not. Writing is portable and permanent, and it makes your thinking visible. That being said, it is an essential skill that one must learn. Hence why English/Language Arts is a core class in most schools. These schools teach various types of writing that are used in different areas of work and life, and that are essential to college life. However, we would like to know specifically why academic writing style is so important to our educational careers. More so, why is academic writing more important that professional or personal writing when it comes to the educational field?
According to James Hartley of Colorado Technical College: “Academic writing refers to
a style of expression that researchers use to define the intellectual boundaries of their disciplines and their specific areas of expertise. Characteristics of academic writing include many things like a formal tone, use of the third-person perspective rather than a first-person perspective, a clear focus on the research problem that is under investigation, and very precise word choice. Like specialist languages adopted in other professions, such as law or medicine, academic writing is designed to convey agreed meaning about complex ideas or concepts for a group of scholarly experts.”
Universities, high schools and even elementary schools all around the world use academic writing almost on a daily basis. Usually when a student starts school their instructor/teacher begin to teach certain shapes called letters that the student will learn to use and will be used for the rest of their lives. When the instructor then decides these students are ready to begin writing they start to write stories. They learn to use their imagination and are taught to put their thoughts on to paper. Over the years their stories begin to turn into essays. The essays
begin to get more elaborate and are then used to help a student think and analyze on what they have heard, seen and read. Now the teacher is assigning pieces of literature for the students to read and reflect on. By stating their opinion about the assigned literature, they describe their absolute understanding on the topic. After years writing students start to “… rely on three main sources of guidance…” such as “… memories,” “… peer feedback,” and “…examples of recently published writing…” (Sword 24). As students writing begin to develop more and more they start to “…become disciplined…” (12). Students train to produce more professional and polished work when writing academically to help the student for work life. This is a very important detail for the professors so they know that you will be ready and successful in the future. To a professor a student’s style shouldn’t fluctuate between one or another.
However, as you get older writing starts to become more varied and complex. There is still much to understand about academic writing and one of the most important things to understand is that writing helps you think, and thinking is what college or any school is all about. Academic writing is not merely just recording ideas or proving learning, it’s more so the action of creating ideas as well as learning and creating learning. In a higher sense, academic writing is less of a product, and more of a process. This is why academic writing is so valuable to the educational process. It provides food for thought, and enables you to knead small, half-baked words into big loaves of creative thoughts and satisfying ideas. Developing such ideas requires writing them onto paper so you can see them. Then you must return to them, explore them, question, clarify, change, as well as grow them as time goes on. It is almost like growing plants and waiting for the results. First you would plant the seed or start the process. Then you would let your mind and conscience take over. After, you would let your dreaming or anything that influences you continue to develop your ideas, basically like watering a plant. Needless to say, writing helps us to bring all that activity into a significant piece of literature, and helps to clarify and direct our thinking. Learning, thinking, and writing are very much all part of the same process, and that’s what your instructors are expecting in your writing, proof of your advancement in thinking and learning.
However, bringing your thinking out and directing it to your actual products isn’t something that just comes naturally. Somehow even the best students experience hardships and discomforts as they develop their thinking. That said, “Academic writing isn’t just “writing to the point” and getting it right the first time. Academic Writing is Academic Rewriting.” Stated by professors from Suny Empire State College. Sony Empire State College professors also stated that “as you write to learn, you are expected to tolerate — in fact, actively seek — uncertainty, mistakes to learn from, ideas irritatingly contrary to your own. You are expected to leave the shore, the protected waters of secure and easy initial thinking and first drafts, to enter deep water, where you will encounter the unexpected. There you seek new information, new directions, and new perspectives from readers and from other writers and sources. Then, through a combination of your rethinking and your responses to new discoveries you develop a paper, an essay, very different from the one you would have been able to write in the earliest stages of the writing process.”
So what is academic writing used for and why is it so important? Well I believe academic writing is used to test a student’s knowledge and learnability. This means, academic writing is used to see or to test if a student is retaining the knowledge that has been taught or studied. Some say that academic writing is a “… communication tool for conveying acquired knowledge…” (Copland). I also believe that academic writing is so important to our educational careers because it teaches us to apply, evaluate, interpret, critique, describe, argue, compare, define, etc. so much information. These are the very skills we need that most jobs require you too have whether you think so or not. Academic writing is the thing that helps mold a person and teaches them how to create ideas and become a very efficient worker. That is why I believe that academic writing is the form of literature that makes the world go round.