Academic writing is difficult, even for those who had good marks for writing in an educational setting. In fact, because the norms and rules in the two settings are different, those who excelled in education can have an especially hard time at academic writing. These differences arise from the purpose that writing serves in these two contexts.
The main objective of writing in education is to determine whether you understand the given material. That’s why we are taught to explain existing ideas, or tell our opinions. It’s an effective strategy especially when this needs to be achieved at scale, in a standardised manner. The need for efficiency forces writers to prioritise “clarity”, “organisation”, “structure”. While these things can help in academic writing, they are not the focal point.
Writing in academia must move the conversation about a topic. Valuable writing challenges the status quo, or fills in an empty gap. A “well-written” work that brings none of those has no value. Put another way, the goal of writing is not to express the writer’s opinions, but to change the opinion of the reader. If it doesn’t, there is no value. People only read your explanations and opinions in school because they were paid to do so.
One may argue that your opinion, if it is original or new, should be of worth to academia. But this is a misconception of the model of how academic research works. This view assumes an additive model. It looks like a bar chart of knowledge that keeps stacking on top of one another. In reality, it is more of a conversational model. It looks more like a scatter plot with a cluster, where refuted ideas are thrown out, and accepted ones stay.
What is “good” depends on the context it is in. Understand it.
This post is a summary of a video on effective writing which was recommended to us for an essay assignment for my information security class.