According to the psychologist, Dr. Paul J. Silvia - specialized in creative production and arts - writing is not fun but actually painful and frustrating. This difficulty happens because thinking about ideas is much easier and faster than writing about them, he states in his book How to Write a lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing.
Dr. Silvia also states that writing is not a gift but a skill you can learn. However, this is the challenging part of the equation. He argues that grad school focuses on training students on research methods and teaching skills, but not to become strong writers. He advises all grad students to embrace writing as a self-development project. Dr Silvia argues that persistency and following a writing routine, getting feedback, and editing will make students stellar academic writers. His other suggestion for students is to proofread their peers' work to learn from their mistakes or powerful writing.
We have selected six basic writing principles to help you hone your writing skills during graduate school:
1. Know Your Audience
Know your readers to define your text's style and tone. In academic writing, the experts in your field, professors and other researchers, will read your work with certain expectations. They expect written fluency on relevant theories and your expertise to demonstrate your mastery of the research topic.
Depending on the research field, there are differences in structure and style, citation, and forms of explaining concepts. Papers in engineering and science have more graphs and experiments to describe, and in humanities and fine arts, students, often deal with abstract ideas and image analysis. However, in any case note taking techniques are key to start writing confidently.
