This article discusses nine basic and practical tips to improve your academic writing. To give you an opportunity to practice your 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.

Academic writing is a particular type of nonfiction writing, which is used in various academic works, such as reports of university research, proposals of new theories by the researchers, or papers released by scholars analyzing the culture of their fields. This article provides nine practical tips for academic writing that a writer must remember to improve his/her writing style.

9 Practical Tips to Improve Your Academic Writing

Academic writing is a focused, comprehensible, compact, and structured style of writing, which is always backed up by plenty of evidence. The writing tone must be formal; however, the writer should always refrain from using complicated vocabulary and long sentences.

Academic writing, also referred to as scholarly writing, features an elucidation that is typically characterized by various research and evidence. The writing style prioritizes reason over sensual perception. A writer should imagine that the readers are rational, who read for information and intend to contrive a logical and coherent response. Besides creating fresh ideas, an academic writer should purposefully focus on offering new perspectives and link them with the ideas that are already established, along with proper editing and proofreading.

Here in this article, the techniques of academic writing, i.e., the tone and pattern of writing, organization, and content of the writing, manner of editing and proofreading will be discussed, which vary across genres of writing. An academic writer needs to learn these certain stylistic means in view of the fulfillment of these significant academic disciplines.

1. Get assistance from online citation information

You can easily avail a number of online resources to improve your writing skills, which can assist you in the citation and documentation of your project. Your assignment may have adherence to any of the publication styles amongst APA, MLA, or Chicago. By using an online citation, you will be able to format your references in the correct way. You might be asked to enter key bibliographic data before generating a formatted citation. Always remember to check on the citation before using it on your project to ensure that the citation does not contain any mistakes. Review the following articles you might find helpful:

• Importance of Academic Referencing and Citing

• Citation Styles | Which Citation Style Should I Use?

• APA Format Guide for Academic Manuscripts

• APA Manual 7th Edition: The 9 Most Important Changes

2. Increase your reading habit

This is one of the best ways to improve your skills. These days, numbers of resources are available on Google, where you can read high-quality journals, dissertations, and essays on various topics. Reading academic essays written by expert writers will unfailingly help you understand tips and tricks that will guide you toward the right way of incorporating sources as well as ideas and enhance your skills in academic writing. Click here to review six practical tips to help you cultivate a reading habit.

3. Professional academic writing services are of great help

You can easily refrain from getting marked with minor or major issues with your project by seeking the assistance of some professional academic writing service for your manuscript to improvise it significantly. There are several centers for academic writing assistance, which provide online services. If you make use of such services correctly, it can be of great help for you, by making it easier for you to understand the process of essay writing at a deeper level and develop your writing pattern.

4. Use online dictionaries

Sometimes you might get confused to identify the exact word or spelling for your manuscript, as some words sound alike but are spelled differently; for example, many people are not sure about the difference between ‘‘practice’’ and ‘‘practise.’’ Whenever you are confused, make use of an online dictionary and take a few extra seconds to identify and pick the correct word for your line instead of getting marked down for using an incorrect word. You can find the following dictionaries helpful: Collins, Urban, Oxford, Cambridge, Macmillan, or Meriam-Webster.

5. If you avail of any online library, utilize it

The Google search engine is doubtlessly synonymous in getting hands-on any type of information with just one click. Yet, you should not entirely depend upon Google for the information you need for your project. Sometimes your institute or organization gives you access to some online libraries, which contain numerous high-quality sources, most of which are not open for all. If you make use of these as your writing resources, it will become much easier for you to furbish your project with the latest research on the subject. Get ready to impress your publisher with a greater depth of manuscript by utilizing the high-quality sources you can avail.

6. Provide up-to-date information to make your academic writing more shine

Content is supposed to be based on the information that is up to date. If revised data are not being considered to develop compelling content, then the content might be ambiguous. The information that is being taken under consideration to prepare content is presumed to be validated and trustworthy, hence up-to-date. 

7. Use eye-catching headlines

An excellent eye-catching headline or title is required to be provided by the author to attract prospective readers. According to Time magazine, a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page. That means readers usually spend about 15 seconds searching which content the user is supposed to go through. Hence, the writers are recommended to include a beautiful opening and preparatory statement.

8. Avoid plagiarism for effective academic writing

It is of vital importance for the authors to ensure that they have not failed to cite the original source of any information, advertently or inadvertently. It could appear tempting, at times, to share some interesting data or statistics as one’s own, possibly by paraphrasing the original text. However, this will be considered blatant plagiarism, and the research paper may potentially be desk rejected or never sent for peer review.

Plagiarism is considered a serious offense in academic studies. The Office of Research Integrity determines plagiarism as both the theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work. Given that the consequences of plagiarism, which may serve as a deterrent, range from mere caution to failure in a course. It is true that some students intentionally submit plagiarized assignments. However, there are those who commit the offense because of various misconceptions about it. 

Briefly, it is clear that trying as much as possible to avoid plagiarism is one unquestionable way to get good grades in academic assignments. Professors and academic advisors or supervisors watch out for plagiarism, and a slight copy and paste could be the end of getting good grades in your college assignment. For more information about plagiarism, review the following articles:

• What is Plagiarism | How to Avoid It?

• 5 Practical Ways to Avoid Plagiarism

9. Avail of professional editing and proofreading services

Whether you are going to write a college essay, term paper, or thesis, you should not forget to take advantage of help from a professional. Yes, you may need to retain the help of editing and proofreading professionals. It is a fact that by availing of editing and proofreading solutions, you can easily get your work done according to your specific requirements. So, if you are confused about how to write quality academic papers, you should look nowhere else but for professional English editing and proofreading services. Hence, a good content writer should have his/her manuscript edited or proofread before getting the final work published on any of the internet podiums. Having discussed the various elementary rudiments of content developing, are you looking for an expert to polish your otherwise excellent literature review language? Be sure to check out our professional editing and proofreading services!

Proofreading service aims to correct all errors in grammar, punctuation, syntax, and spelling in your paper. Editing service will improve the quality of your academic writing hence the content, the overall structure, the quality of findings and analysis, simplicity, and referencing. In other words, editing will mostly make some major changes to improve the standard of the academic writing of the document. This is especially important because an editing service will guarantee that the main purpose of the paper is met.

If you need help, contact us unhesitatingly!

The expert editors of Best Edit & Proof focus on offering manuscripts with proper tone, content, and style of academic writing, and also provide an upscale editing and proofreading service for you. If you consider our pieces of advice, you will witness a notable increase in the chance for your research manuscript to be accepted by the publishers. We work together as an academic writing style guide by bestowing subject-area editing and proofreading around several categorized styles of writing. With the group of our expert editors, you will always find us all set to help you identify the tone and style that your manuscript needs to get a nod from the publishers.

You can also avail of our assistance if you are looking for editors who can format your manuscript, or just check on the particular styles for the formatting task as per the guidelines provided to you, e.g., APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian styles. Best Edit & Proof editors and proofreaders provide all sorts of academic writing help, including editing and proofreading services, using our user-friendly website, and a streamlined ordering process.

Kindly visit our order page if you want our subject-area editors or language experts to work on your manuscript to improve its tone and style and give it a perfect academic tone and style through proper editing and proofreading. The process of submitting a paper is very easy and quick. Click here to find out how it works.

Our pricing is based on the type of service you avail of here, be it editing or proofreading. We charge on the basis of the word count of your manuscript that you submit for editing and proofreading and the turnaround time it takes to get it done. If you want to get an instant price quote for your project, copy and paste your document or enter your word count into our pricing calculator.

Contact us to get support with academic editing and proofreading. We have a 24/7 active live chat mode to offer you direct support along with qualified editors to refine and furbish your manuscript.

Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn,  Facebook, Instagram, and Medium.

For more posts, click here.