6 Tips about Academic Writing for #AcWriMo

1. Before You Write—Read

The best practice before writing a research paper? Doing your reading. Finding high quality sources is
foundational to any academic paper. Browse scholarly journals (maybe on, say, JSTOR?) and books from
university and scholarly presses. Obviously your school library is a major resource here, and research
librarians from within your discipline are great people to talk to at the beginning of a project.

2. Gather Your Sources

Look at your sources, then look at your sources’ sources. Great academic writing is often a product of
what came before it. A good source will have clues in its bibliography for finding similarly helpful works.
Authority can be tricky to determine, especially now. A study from 2009 found that students today have a
harder time parsing the trustworthiness of sources, especially sources they find online. So pay close
attention to the information surrounding a source, including its date, author, publisher, and general
consistency. Who wrote your sources? When and why?

3. Draft an Outline

That hamburger chart you learned in high school? Still a pretty good model. An outline helps organize
your thoughts, and see your writing holistically. This can be formal or informal, but it usually helps to
have some kind of outline. A study in four disciplines (history, biology, psychology, and business) found
that outlines helped organize students’ thoughts and clarify their papers’ structure.

4. Dive into the Archives

Primary sources, as your history professor will tell you, are key. Archives are incredible troves of
firsthand research materials, special collections, and often house important primary documents after their
owners and authors pass away. See if your school has any special collections related to your topic. A
research librarian will know. You may also want to familiarize yourself with some of the ethical issues in
archival research in this piece from College Composition and Communication.

5. Create a Thesis—and Defend it

A research paper isn’t a book report. It’s not a summary of the existing research, though it does do some
summarizing. It takes a stance. It’s supposed to be argumentative in one way or another. It answers that
famous question “So what?” In this piece from College English, composition scholar Margaret Kantz digs
into teaching persuasive writing.

6. Keep it Simple

With some exceptions, academic writing rewards clarity, concision, and confidence. This doesn’t mean
you have to water your ideas down. Try to say something complicated—but put it plainly. Scholar
Stanley Fish outlines some issues regarding clarity, interpretation, and originality in this philosophical
essay from Critical Inquiry. In it, Fish reminds that “[a] sentence that seems to need no interpretation is
already the product of one.”