Writing for Academic Audiences

Sara Rufner

Learning Outcomes

Understand the difference between academic audiences and general audiences.
Learn the characteristics of academic writing including
- academic genres
- style guides

What Sets Academic Writing Apart?

Writing for academic audiences is also known as “scholarly writing” and is, therefore, meant to be read by scholars in a particular field. It usually involves research of some kind–whether it’s written to record the data in an experiment (like a lab journal), or to request research funding (a grant proposal), to review what’s been done in the field (a literature review), or to compose a final write-up of one’s experimental results (a research article).

Another way to define academic writing is to talk about what it’s not. It’s not the kind of writing found in popular sources such as online newspapers, blogs, magazines, Instagram, or Twitter–those are all intended for a “general audience” or a “popular audience” composed of people in general, not in a specific field.

Here’s a comparison of how writing for a general audience differs from academic writing:

General Audience	vs.	Academic Audience
Short paragraphs	vs.	Long paragraphs
Engaging, friendly tone	vs.	Serious, academic tone
Logical progression/light referencing	vs.	Synthesized claims, heavy referencing
Clever wording to encourage insight	vs.	Clarity to avoid misunderstanding
Focus on practical application	vs.	Focus on knowledge and scientific advancement
Passionate writing with conviction	vs.	Objective writing with solid backing
Focus on narrative and relevance to audience	vs.	Focus on data, methods, and results
Most appeals are to emotions and authority/character	vs.	Most appeals are to logic and authority/character
Hyperlinks or endnotes for references	vs.	In-text citations and reference lists in APA format (or another style guide)

Are There Shortcuts I Can Learn in Academic Writing?

People in specific fields use shortcuts like shared vocabulary words (jargon) or uniform organization to make it easier to understand and/or access the most important information in their field. These shortcuts have developed as a discourse community has needed a standard way of doing something.

Genre

Many of these agreed-upon shortcuts have now turned into their own genres or expected ways of formatting a document. For example, if you ask your professor to recommend you to a graduate program, you expect them to write a formal letter of recommendation rather than, say, a text message or a message in a bottle. And, in fact, the formality and rigid organization of the letter of recommendation themselves signal to the audience that this is an official statement, that it should be taken much more seriously than a text message (or bottle message), and that the author has put significant thought and time into the document. The choice of genre alone is a sign to the audience of the document’s context and purpose.

So just like you keep a “jargon journal,” start paying attention to and noting the genres you see used most in your field as well. For instance, you might have noticed that the typical format for a research article follows the IMRAD Format: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This format was developed by the scientific community to report research results because it makes it very easy to find information fast. Scholarly readers know they’ll always find the review of literature in the Introduction section and a summary of the data analysis in the Results section. This also makes it easy to compare across several articles like to analyze the techniques reported in the Methods section of several articles.

Peer-Reviewed Journals

As people began reporting on their research, they needed venues in which to show others what they learned. So groups of scholars created specialized journals where people could publish their research for others to see. Every field has many academic journals like The Journal of Neuroscience, Progress in Human Geography, or The Annual Review of Public Health where the main scholarly conversations are happening today–and most have very high standards. To keep their standards high, the editors of journals use the peer review process where all articles are reviewed by two or more experts who give feedback on such things as the quality of the research, the caliber of the methodology, the accuracy of the results, and even the style of the writing. This feedback then goes back to the authors who revise and resubmit their articles until they’re accepted for publication.

Style Guides

These journals also brought about another shortcut for scholars: a set standard for the style of writing. When people submit articles for review to be published in an academic journal, they have to make a lot of decisions about the style of their writing. How would you know if you should include an Oxford Comma–a comma in a list after the word “and”–or if headings should be bolded or if you need to include a title page and an abstract? Many of these decisions are arbitrary (they don’t matter very much in the grand scheme of things), but not all of them are–and either way, a decision still has to be made.

Academic journals started publishing the answers to these questions in “Style Guides” so people wouldn’t have to ask all the nitpicky questions. One of the most famous style guides came in 1929 from the American Psychological Association (APA). This guide has gone through many editions (the 2019 7th edition is the most recent) and has become the standard for most of the sciences today. The APA Manual delineates all the minute as well as the major standards they’ve decided on for the social sciences including everything from a specific way to cite sources (year first, then the author’s name, etc.) to whether or not to use the Oxford Comma (yes) to an entire section on how to avoid biased language. In fact, it was a big deal when the lastest edition announced a change from requiring two spaces after every period to one. (You can see how nerdy things can get over at the APA!)

And even though the APA decided on certain standards, that doesn’t mean all style guides are the same. For example, the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) (or the closely related Turabian style) is used in some social sciences like history, and the American Sociological Association Style Guide is used in–you guessed it–sociology. Even businesses and universities can have a style guide to keep things standardized in all their publications. So my point isn’t which style guide is better, but rather, that you should figure out which style guide is used most in your field and follow that. It will provide many of the shortcuts to your discourse community.

Adapted from “Writing for Academic Audiences.” Authored by: Christie Cowles Charles and Julie Haupt. Located at: https://edtechbooks.org/writing

License: CC BY-SA

APA Citation

Charles, C. C. & Haupt, J. (2020). Writing for Academic Audiences. In C. C. Charles (Ed.), Writing in the Social Sciences. EdTech Books. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/writing/academic