Academic Writing - Formalities and Tips

You have determined the structure of your academic paper and are now ready to start writing? Then you should know some special features when formulating academic texts, which we would like to present to you in this article.

A few things to keep in mind

Basically, the text of an academic paper should have a number of properties that have become established in academic research, in addition to self-evident principles such as avoiding spelling and grammatical errors. The general style of the work should be objective and factual and accordingly avoid personal opinions, moral judgments, humor, irony, etc. The most important things include:

1. No first-person form
   Another fundamental rule is the avoidance of the so-called first-person form or the personal pronouns "I", "we" and "one". Instead, mostly passive sentence constructions are used, thus directing the focus on the content of the text rather than on its author. Furthermore, it should be avoided to directly address the reader in a formulation.
    
2. Present tense
   Academic papers are largely written in the present tense in academic practice. Since another principle of academic writing includes consistency of language, it is therefore always advisable in case of doubt to use the present tense. There are, however, some exceptions, such as explicit references to events in the past or individual parts of the work such as foreword, reflection, and acknowledgments, in which past tense and perfect or pluperfect can also be used.
    
3. Clear language
   It is advisable to use short, concise sentences rather than complex sentence constructions when formulating. This also helps to maintain a comprehensible writing style and thus to ensure an organized text structure with logical thought progression ("red thread"). Care should be taken to use precise language with appropriate technical terms, whereby technical terms should be introduced and defined. Thus word repetitions are not necessarily bad writing style as long as correct technical terms are used. The noted "precise language" includes in particular the requirement not to use imprecise or "blurred" words such as "approximately", "sometimes", etc.
    
4. Well-founded source base
   Since academic papers are usually based on research results of other authors, this must be made clear at the appropriate places. This is done by a reference in the text using a footnote and a corresponding entry in the bibliography. If you do not clearly mark references to other works in your text, this is plagiarism, which can have consequences up to and including failure of your own work. To prevent this, you will learn more about correct citation in the next article.

 

Proper citation, a particularly important part of academic writing

In addition to the formalities that you must consider in an academic paper, one aspect in particular is very important and often takes a lot of time: proper citation. But since it can often decide on a good grade or even lead to failure in the work (if you don't provide sources), it's worth taking a closer look at the special features of citation. For this we have listed the most important citation styles with various examples in the next chapter.

 

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Next chapter:
Chapter 6 - Proper citation: The ultimate guide with examples

• What should you pay attention to when citing in academic papers?
• What citation styles are there?
• How do different types of sources differ in citation style?