This guide covers basic academic writing concepts, including a glossary of technical terms and explains the relationship between writing, thinking, and learning.
This guide will be helpful for students who are new to academic writing.
Many students understandably develop a certain level of anxiety around academic writing for various internal and external reasons, most of which can be attributed to the lack of understanding of academic writing as a practice. This glossary breaks down some common terms related to academic writing to help you better navigate it.
|
Term |
Explanation |
|---|---|
| academic writing noun |
Writing in an academic context for academic readers, to discuss a specific topic. Academic writing is usually non-fiction and can be in many forms: essays, reports, research papers, journal articles, proposals, reflections, etc. |
|
analyze
analysis |
To break down a concept or topic or idea into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of said concept/topic/idea. You may be asked to write an essay to analyze the declining popularity of superhero movies in recent years. You will have to break the topic down into smaller questions as below to help you and your readers understand the topic better:
A type of writing in which the writer breaks down a concept or topic or idea into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of said concept/topic/idea, sometimes to generate new meanings. |
|
argue argument |
To present and defend a point of view, using reasons and evidence.
|
| audience noun |
Readers of a piece of writing. When writing in an academic context, writers may consider their potential readers, e.g. instructors, students, researchers, reviewers, etc. to use appropriate language and rhetoric. The audience of a midterm essay submitted for ENG101 might be your instructor, but the audience of a text asking if you should get more toilet paper from the store is more likely your roommate. |
| brainstorm verb |
To generate ideas about a certain topic as a starting point for further research and drafting. |
| discourse noun |
Written or spoken communication or debate about a certain topic. |
|
draft |
An unfinished version of your writing. Writers tend to go through multiple drafts before submitting or publishing the final version of their writing, as they usually seek advice and feedback from their editors, peers, supervisors, friends, or family and revise extensively as part of their writing practice. |
| essay noun |
A type of writing in which writers demonstrate their understanding, exploration, and/or informed opinion on a certain area of study. Essays usually have one controlling topic/idea/concept. Length: Essays can be short (around 500 words) or long (10 - 20 pages),depending on the purpose of your essay and the requirement of your assignment. Structure: While most essays follow the introduction - body - conclusion structure, there is no standardized method to organize your essay, despite the common misunderstanding that essays can only be 5 paragraphs long. Instead, think of your essay as containing different sections, each dedicated to a particular argument or purpose and containing 1 or more paragraphs. |
|
feedback |
Comments that writers receive from their readers. Feedback is a common practice in writing that helps writers identify the strengths and weaknesses of their writing so that they can make appropriate changes and improve. |
| outline noun |
A list or map of the main points of an essay, paper, report, article, presentation, etc. |
| paragraph noun |
A unit of text in an essay or paper made up of several sentences, often dedicated to discussing one particular aspect of the essay or paper's main topic. |
| paraphrase verb |
To rewrite text by changing words and sentence structure but keeping the meaning the same. Often used when writers want to restate their point or make a reference to another text in their writing. |
|
revise |
To rewrite a draft in whole or in part to improve it, usually after receiving feedback. Revising is is a common practice in writing |
|
summarize |
To rewrite a text to only include the main points. |
| text noun |
Written or spoken words that carry meaning. Often used in academic settings as an umbrella term to refer to all written works. |
| thesis noun |
The controlling idea/topic of an essay or paper, often stating the writer's stance on a debatable position. |
| thesis statement noun |
A statement that clearly defines the controlling idea/topic of an essay or paper. Thesis statements can be more than one sentence and does not have to be at the end of the introduction. |
| topic sentence noun |
A statement that clearly defines the controlling idea/point/claim/argument of a section of an essay or paper. |
Summary
Writing is an incredibly effective tool to:
- Foster critical and creative thinking
- Help students make their transition into and communicate with academics
- Develop media literacy: reading comprehension, source analysis and evaluation
- Develop leadership skills: planning, strategizing, and problem-solving
- Develop communication skills: producing, organizing, and articulating critical arguments clearly and concisely, for different audiences.
True or False: You can only get good grades if your instructors see how much you can memorize your textbook.
False.
What you are expected to do while studying in college is not to demonstrate how much of the course material you can memorize, but how much of the material you can digest and process, and ultimately how far, wide, and deep you can explore that material.
In other words, you are learning to think for yourself.
Imagine you're digging a hole to find treasure: do you care more about how deep down you can dig, or do you care more about how high you can stack the dirt?
Writing, therefore, is usually one of the first foundational skills you learn in any higher education program for a couple of reasons:
There are questions that the internet might not give you all the answers to. These questions can be big: "What is the relationship between credit culture and class stratification?" But they can also be small: "Why in the world do eggs cost so much these days?" In that case, you have to do the digging yourself. Being able to question what you have been taught to believe is where the organic learning process really starts — as naturally as digging a hole. And chances are you are already digging these holes on the daily without realizing!
To better explain the relations between writing and learning, let's think of it as an onion (not the part where it makes you cry).
1. If we imagine the core of the onion as a product of the thinking process — an idea or a thought, for example, then to reach the idea, we will have to peel off all the outer layers by:
2. Now wouldn't life be easy if the actual writing and thinking process went step by step like that?
In reality, a lot of times when you are cooking, you don't peel the onion by the layers — you chop or dice or mince the whole thing.
This is when your research, your processing, your thinking, your analyzing, and your ideas get all mixed up with each other. Sometimes you start with an idea, go through the research process, gain a new understanding on a topic, then have to start from scratch all over again.
While this process is a lot less straightforward and a lot more chaotic than the one above, it is also a more realistic depiction of the organic learning process.
So now you have a handful of onion pieces and your kitchen smells like onion. Do you start cooking now? Do you start writing when you have a idea? What do you write? How are you going to write?
The answer is: Writing is the knife with which you cut the onion.
Writing is not just the end product of your thinking and learning process, something that you use to signal to your instructor that you have finished learning what they taught, or that you have done the work they assigned. In fact, at every step of the way, you can be writing:
Writing encourages you to stabilize and reflect on your thinking, instead of letting it run free.
Let's pretend you're thinking of making burgers for dinner. Sure, you know how to assemble a burger, but you don't know what you need to buy to make a burger. So you write down a grocery list, like so:
But then maybe after you write it down, you realize you already have lettuce and cheese at home because last week you were so set on getting your life together and bringing your own lunch to school instead of eating out. So you cross out lettuce and cheese from the list, and now you have a much better idea of what to shop for.
While this is a rather simplistic example of the relationship between writing and thinking, it goes to show that writing is an incredibly powerful tool that not only helps you solidify, stabilize, and organize your thoughts but also aids in the process of reflecting — rethinking, questioning, making new decisions — all the skills you need to succeed in your study and career.
Eberly Center. (2008a, June 28). What Is the Value of Students Learning to Write in Your discipline? Carnegie Mellon University. https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/instructionalstrategies/writing/value.html
Eberly Center. (2008b, June 28). Why are students coming into college poorly prepared to write? Canergie Mellon University . https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/instructionalstrategies/writing/poorlyprepared.html
Horkoff, T. (2021). Post-secondary reading and writing. Writing for Success – 1st Canadian H5P Edition. BCcampus. https://opentextbc.ca/writingforsuccessh5p/chapter/post-secondary-reading-and-writing/
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Writing in college: from competence to excellence by