Consider:
What are the differences between speaking and writing? (Think about how you would communicate something differently in these two ways, and why.)
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Features of academic writing
Academic writing…
- is writing that shows evidence of learning
- considers a subject in its different aspects, relations and implications
- reviews a subject with a sense of sceptical enquiry
- re-examines a subject in order to test and develop ideas and theories
Here are some examples of opening sentences from articles in academic journals. What identifies these sentences as belonging to academic forms of writing? What characteristics do they share?
- Edwin Morgan will be seventy this year and his oeuvre is now a substantial one. This essay examines some of the ways in which racialized ideologies were constituted in the nineteenth century in the context of British imperialism.
- Edna O’Brien is a writer more often judged as dealing with private passions than the wider world of politics.
- The rapprochement of bibliography and contemporary theory has become so familiar a fact of Shakespeare studies that it is now routinely invoked as a fait accompli.