Basics of Academic Writing 

In the broad sense, academic writing can be understood as any writing done to meet a requirement of a college or university. For some students, scholarly writing is a real burden and they meet this requirement through academic writing services like Essayvikings.com while others try to cope with this themselves. Whatever your personal path may be, it is undoubtedly necessary to understand the basics of academic writing by the end of studies. 

The most common form of academic writing is an essay writing. Essay stands for somehow a shorter piece of writing requiring the student to develop such skills as close reading, comprehensive analysis, comparison, persuasion, clarity, and exposition. Thus, academic writing guides see the main purpose of essay writing in encouragement of students to develop own ideas and concepts in writing by dwelling on more than one’s own thoughts. 

Common Essay Types 

Owing to a variety of purposes essay drafting pursues, there are respectively different types of academic essays. The most commonly used types of essays in the scholarly setting are as follows: 

  • Expository essay: engages students to investigate an idea and expand on it in the own work by introducing the argument pertaining to that idea. This essay is often used for evaluation of student’s comprehension of the studied topic and is a frequent form of the examination. 
  • Descriptive essay: invites students to create written description of any object, process with a great deal of artistic freedom. The main goal of such essay would be to evoke a particular image of feeling in the mind of a reader. 
  • Narrative essay: presents students an opportunity to tell a story in a riveting manner so that nobody is left unmoved. Story can be either anecdotal or personal so that a person can fully express himself or herself with the help of it. 
  • Argumentative essay: seeks to teach students on how to process literature, conduct empirical studies and on the basis of those develop personal opinion on the issue and formulate it in a concise manner. This essay usually requires more deep research into the topic both theoretical and empirical as compared to other types. 

Main Features of Academic Writing
Academic writing principles are relatively unified all over the world and have a number of common characteristics. British scholars for instance, state that academic essay has to question certain status quo and be a critical analysis of the matter. Among other principal features of academic writing are the following ones: 

  • Clear and precise focus. Every scholarly paper has to deal with one matter which is established in the very beginning as a thesis statement. Each paragraph has to be connected to this thesis statement in a way that it describes a particular side or aspect of the matter. Moreover, each paragraph begins with a statement guiding the reader through the rest of the paragraph. 
  • Logical structure. Academic essay has to follow a certain structure to ensure readers’ understanding of the issue. Any essay should begin with an introduction, followed by main body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Introduction lays out the necessary background information and states the writer’s thesis. Body paragraphs describe the subject matter in detail by providing supporting points. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the information and highlights the implications of the main paper’s findings.  
  • Evidence-based arguments. To ensure the credibility of the academic work, it has to incorporate only such arguments which can be empirically proved. There is no place for unevidenced arguments in the academic essay as these do not add any value to the paper. 

All in all, academic writing is a distinct kind of intellectual activity to be honed during the years at university or college. Without proper understanding of an essay, its different types and basic scholarly writing principles one cannot master significant argumentation skills.