The Principles of Academic Essay Writing

This article aims to provide the basic essential elements that can make a student’s writing work more academic. This article is written with the understanding that as students, they should be able to master the basic skills required to be able to write better academic essays so they will be able to achieve better marks in their overall academic performance.

The academic essay is a particular form of writing which universities particularly require their students to master. It allows the students to demonstrate the abilities they learned throughout the learning process in writing form. Academic writing also requires students to exhibit other skills involved during the essay writing process, such as their conceptual grasp of the topic presented, organization of thoughts and selection of reference materials as evidence of their thorough research.



What easily discourages students from writing academic essays is their perception that their creativity is repressed as the academic essay already sets conventions and rules as to how to write it. Some also deem the questions their professors pose as terrifying, that they might not be able to give the correct answer that their professors want.

What most students fail to recognize is that essay questions do not have right or wrong answers. Professors evaluate their students’ work based on how they remain to be independent with their views through their arguments and presentation of supporting facts.

In approaching an academic essay, students must not forget the professor’s preferences and other essay requirements. Once the students are able to identify the parameters required, they can now plan what words to use and what angle to approach to make their academic essays creative, accurate, informative and convincing.

In terms of academic writing, the tone is one of the most essential elements students should not disregard. The academic essay does not intend to talk about the rain, and therefore, be conversational; it intends to inform or convince readers with the writer’s points with credible facts as support. And to be able to develop impact in an academic essay, it has to adopt a formal, impersonal tone.

To develop a formal tone, the first thing that students remember is to avoid the use of contractions. Contractions are written representations of a conversational idea, and therefore must be avoided in an academic essay. The use of exclamation marks should be avoided, unless they are included in a passage that the students have cited in their work.

Other elements that make a written work conversational are the use of joking comments, slang words, chattiness, or one-sentence paragraphs. The standard structure of an academic essay requires a paragraph for a single thought or point, and this point must be further expounded by additional points and sentences. The essay must also be written using the third person point of view; the use of we, you, our and us, among others, is therefore prohibited.

For more information on how students can develop an effective and appropriate academic essay, they can look for online samples and previous written works by other students as their guides. They can also let other students critique their work so they can have additional opinions to the work that they have made. For a more professional evaluation, the students can sign up to legitimate online essay writing service providers that also offer essay marking and grading services.

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