This brief guide discusses four common types of academic writing. To give you an opportunity to practice proofreading, we have left a few spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors in the text. See if you can spot them! If you spot the errors correctly, you will be entitled to a 10% discount.

As a student or anyone in the academic field, you need to know about your text even before you start writing it. In academic writing, there are so many rules, regulations, styles, and guides that you need to follow. Naturally, to write a good piece of work, you need to make sure that you know about what you are writing. Similarly, it is important to know about the different types of academic writing before you get started on it. This guide discusses the various types of scholarly writing.

About academic writing

Academic or scholarly writing is a type of writing used in scholarly publications and universities. It is used for writing for any academic topics, including academic journals, books, thesis, research papers, dissertations. When it comes to academic writing, the main point of difference from conventional writing style is its formal and straightforward tone. Therefore, you can distinguish an academic work through its characteristics such as:

• Formal tone

• Unbiased in nature

• Precise, straightforward, and clear

• Well-structured and constructed

• Factual with properly cited sources.

These are the few characteristics that can help you distinguish academic writing from conventional writing. This writing is strictly used for official and academic works and not for personal or informal content.

The different types of academic writing

Depending on your topic and academic content, you might have to take a different approach to your academic writing. Based on that, academic work can be classified into the following four major types.

1. Descriptive writing

Descriptive writing is one of the simplest and most used academic writing types. The main purpose of descriptive writing is to state facts and inform the audience. So, when you hear these terms in any academic piece — report, summarize, identify, record, define — know that it is descriptive academic writing, which is mostly used for school-level writing and completely theory-based projects.

2. Analytical writing

Analytical writing is the next type of academic writing commonly used in the academic field. When you are working on an academic study, you usually do not only use descriptive writing. You must mix and match different types of writing to convey your message to your target group. Therefore, aside from simply informing, you need to also organize your information in a way that allows your readers to understand the content better. Instead of simply stating your facts and data, you also explain what they are and how they are related to each other. Phrases such as ‘’examine,’’ ‘’compare,’’ ‘’relate,’’ ‘’contrast,’’ and ‘’analyze’’ are the most common words used in analytical writing. 

How to get better at analytical writing:

• Plan out your data and information before writing.

• Try understanding the relationship between your factors before grouping them.

• Dedicate one paragraph or section to one analytical category.

• Always use a crisp and clear introduction.

3. Persuasive writing

In simple words, persuasive writing involves all the things that an analytical type of writing consists of, with the addition of your opinion — hence, persuasive. Here, along with all facts and information, you derive your opinion out of them. It may be as an interpretation, argument, recommendation, or evaluation of the facts. Whichever it may be, make sure to support your arguments with evidence. Words such as ‘’evaluate,’’ ‘’argue,’’ and ‘’discuss,’’ signify a persuasive form of academic writing.

4. Critical writing

Critical writing is used for advanced pieces and works. This type of critical writing is considered another level in persuasive writing, apart from your opinion, you need to state another viewpoint. Usually used for research, dissertations, reviews, and critical analysis, here you need to talk of your opinion while discussing another viewpoint. For example, for research works, researchers usually discuss existing researchers’ opinions before emphasizing their opinions. Here, phrases such as ‘’evaluate,’’ ‘’debate,’’ ‘’critique,’’ and ‘’disagree’’ denote critical writing.

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