Academic Writing in 2024: 5 Key Dos & Don’ts + Examples

• Dec 27, 2023
• 7 min read

• Tags: Academic Writing, Dissertation, Essay

While formal writing spans everything from academic essays to a thesis, there are a few basic rules that apply to all types of academic writing. To a student, writing in different formats can sometimes be nothing short of a specifically designed torture! But if you pay attention to the basic rules of academic writing, these assignments become significantly less daunting. So, we’ve summarized these rules in the top five dos and don’ts of academic writing, with examples to help you understand better.

Rules of academic writing

We get it, you find it tedious to follow the many rules of citing and referencing in a paper. Plus, if you’re finishing your essay at the last moment, it makes matters even worse!

So here’s a list of dos and don’ts of academic writing that’ll make your life much, much easier:

Dos

1. Write objectively

Academic writing is objective by nature: it’s factual, logical, unemotional, and precise. So, you need to be impersonal while stating facts, and take care not to distort factual data with personal feelings and prejudices.

You’re expected to present your reading, research, and analysis of the topic in an impersonal, objective manner. This ensures that your efforts translate well and your argument has no obstructions.

This is how you can achieve objectivity in formal writing:

1. Use credible sources and substantial data to back up your arguments.
2. Avoid using slang and clichés.
3. Write in the third person, rather than the first or second person.

Let’s take a look at an academic writing example to make this clear:

2. Write clearly

Clarity should be your primary concern in formal writing. All the rules of academic writing are designed to ensure that the presentation of your analysis or research is easy for others to go through.

Make sure that your audience understands the presented ideas readily without having to read too much into your paragraphs.

Follow these tips to write clearly in academic papers:

1. Begin each new paragraph with a topic, a subtopic, or a new idea that is introduced.
2. Let the beginning of each sentence be brief and simple, and put intricate information at the end.
3. In the sentences that follow, add data to support your statement and elaborate further on the topic.
4. Write a connecting sentence that ends your current paragraph while also introducing the next idea that you can pick up in the following paragraph.
5. Develop your entire topic in this manner, from the first sentence to the last.

Here’s an example from an academic paper:

3. Use technical vocabulary

Every subject you study has some jargon associated with it. It always helps to include this terminology in academic essays or papers. This makes your writing pointed and precise, also showing your expertise in the subject.

One main tip to get this done is to go through the glossary of terms that most textbooks have at the end of the chapter or the book. Refer to this section to use such terms correctly. However, remember to use these terms accurately. If you use technical terminology in the wrong manner, you may come off as an amateur!

Here’s a formal writing example:

4. Proofread carefully

Sometimes your essay or paper can end up being too long, a bit contrived, or carelessly worded. But even if writing your essay at the last minute is an agony common to all academics, grammar mistakes and formatting errors should not have a place in your document. They make for a loathsome impression, no matter how ingenious you are with your ideas.

The ideal tip here is to start writing early and leave time for you to proofread later. But when you’re struggling with twelve different assignments at any given moment, it can get hard to carve some time out and leisurely go through your hard work. Sometimes, even an entire day doesn’t provide enough distance and clarity for you to catch all the errors.

If you can, it’s always great to hire a proofreading service. When a language and formatting expert goes through your words, they’ll check your writing for clarity, vocabulary, and objectivity. Meanwhile, you can take the time to start writing your next assignment!

We can’t really offer an example here, since proofreading is a post-writing activity, but you can visit this page for a free sample of how an editing and proofreading service can improve your work.

5. Structure your academic sentences

No matter your target audience, a series of long winding sentences is always uncomfortable to read. This becomes important especially in scientific papers, where the language needs to be precise and clear, instead of confusing and misleading. Even if you’re writing for some other discipline, the rules of academic writing will always tell you to aim for directness over embellishments.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you should always go for short and concise sentences. Reading a series of short sentences feels rushed, and it’s difficult to communicate the full scope of your ideas through such sentences. The way out of this is to vary the length and construction of your sentences.

Adding some variety to your writing makes it interesting to the reader. Here are some formal writing tips to help you achieve this:

1. Break up long, winding sentences into two or more parts. Run-on sentences (in which two or more clauses are inappropriately joined) are always better off as a series of concise sentences.
2. Avoid using sentence fragments. They’re creative in informal writing, but improper and unprofessional in formal writing.
3. A series of short sentences is as off-putting as a series of long winded ones. Find a balance between the two.

Academic sentences =/= boring

Notice how both of the following paragraphs go wrong with sentence structure:

The first version tries to stuff all the information into one sentence, while the second one goes overboard with the short sentences. Here’s how you can balance the two:

Don’ts

1. Don’t use colloquial language

Be careful about language usage in your papers. It’s natural for everyday conversational English to flow into your writing, but you must learn to eliminate them from your writing. The rules of formal writing make your ideas easy to understand for anyone in the world, so colloquial phrases and sentences don’t work in an academic paper.

Once you finish writing, go through your paper again and systematically edit your work to replace informal words, phrases, and sentences with their acceptable forms so that your writing is sincere in presentation and objective in tone.

Consider the following sentences:

1. Othello loved Desdemona to the moon and back.

2. Othello loved Desdemona deeply.

At this point, do we even need to tell you which one’s the right choice for academic essays?

2. Avoid inappropriate fonts and styles

Research papers are meant to communicate knowledge with directness and precision, so getting creative with fonts is obviously not what you need to do here.

One of the first things we learn when we’re taught to write essays in school is that your ideas take center stage here, and beautification is nothing but a distraction.

So, restrict yourself to the fonts recommended in your study guide. Usually, it’s either Arial or Times New Roman in 12 points, in black.

3. Don’t change the verb tense

The tense of a verb indicates whether the time of an event is in the past, present, or future. Whether it’s formal writing or informal, it’s a well-known writing rule to not change the verb tense randomly.

Sadly, academics are quite prone to such mistakes, and especially so if the academic essays are being written at 3 AM, fueled by nothing but willpower and strong coffee. So it’s common to end up with something like this (crude) example:

Suffice to say, make sure that you’re not jumping tenses in your paper if the time frame of a given narrative remains the same. This is one of those places where a human proofreader might just help you better than a software, and that’s the only tip we can give you for this one, we’re afraid!

4. Don’t use personal language

Research, analysis, and communication takes priority in academic essays or articles, so using personal language in formal writing is the most amateur mistake you can make. While this can’t always be helped, you need to avoid personal pronouns in academic writing as much as possible.

The only time you can use personal language is when you’re writing an admission essay to describe a personal experience or anecdote. Once you start with your academic course, give a rest to your personal voice and start writing objectively.

Replace your opinions with factual findings, and suspend your personal beliefs and prejudices. Most importantly, never address the reader directly. The following example can reveal how you can avoid using “you” in an essay:

Here are a few examples to help you avoid using personal pronouns in academic writing:

5. Don’t exceed the word count

Students often find it annoying to write academic essays with small word limits. But these limits encourage you to write succinctly and remove redundant information from your work.

The word limit helps you write with precision and ensures that your readers aren’t put off by unnecessary introductory paragraphs or long winding sentences. So, you shouldn’t exceed the word count in an academic document.

Dos and don’ts of academic writing

Here’s a table that can sum up the five dos and don’ts of formal writing for you:

Now that you’ve understood the dos and don’ts, you can use this knowledge to enhance your academic papers. To perfect your academic paper and score high, you can also consider taking our academic editing services.

Keep reading with more resources from your loyal editors and proofreaders:

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Tanvi

With a foundation in Life Sciences, Tanvi enjoys curating technical writing tips tailored for ESL students. When she's not translating complex concepts into bite-sized nuggets, she can be found playing with dogs or painting landscapes.