Today we address the most exciting, earth-shatteringly-amazing, raise-your-hands-and-rejoice writing topic ever: academic writing.
Wait, what? Exciting? Don’t you mean boring?
You’re right—academic writing (think nonfiction, research, educational) is easily stiff and formal, and what’s so exciting about that?
Well, here’s the thing. It may be formal, but it doesn’t have to be boring. If we approach it a little differently, it can be creative, colorful, and yes, even fun. We can write instructionally and still have a great time doing it—and, our readers can have a great time reading it. Promise.
A while ago, I published an article about academic writing—how-tos and basics on constructing a solid paper. This is an important starting point. But today we get into the fun stuff and discuss three ways to give our academic writing a jolt of excitement:
1. The Skeleton: Variety Is Your Friend in Academic Writing
No one wants to read something that sounds like this:
There is little evidence of the giant nocturnal water ape. It seems this creature lives in the swamps of Alabama. It is almost never seen. Dr. James says in his report that only two people have seen this creature, which is said to feed on local wildlife.
While the notion of a giant nocturnal water ape in the United States is interesting, this brief paragraph is written in dry, stuffy, academic prose.
This is where the rule to vary our sentence structure comes into play. In the example above, the typical subject/verb structure is the only one used: the subject did the thing.
This is how we speak, and it’s our default when writing. No more! We must train ourselves to look for variety in how we express ourselves, opening our sentences in different ways and intentionally switching up their lengths, especially in our academic writing, in which it is too easy to get stuck in a rut.
Varying our sentence structure will shake things up and keep the reader (and the writer!) engaged. See how that giant water ape sounds with a little sentence structure tweaking:
From the little evidence there is, it seems the giant nocturnal water ape lives in the swamps of Alabama. It is almost never seen. In his report, Dr. James says that only two people have seen this creature, which is said to feed on local wildlife.
Our work is far from finished, however. There are more ways to make academic writing fun. Its skeletal structure is just the beginning.
2. The Muscles: Make It Pop
Verbs drive sentences. If we use normal, average ones, we’ll go on a slow ramble. If we utilize exciting, spicy ones, we’ll embark on a real ride. Besides varying our sentence structure, we can hunt for unusual verbs—the muscles of our work—to make our writing more engaging and interesting.
Let’s see how our excerpt reads when we swap a few of the normal verbs like “seen” and “says” for colorful ones:
From the little evidence that exists, it seems the giant nocturnal water ape resides in the swamps of Alabama. It is almost never witnessed. In his report, Dr. James states that only two people have glimpsed this creature, which is reported to hunt and devour local wildlife.
See what we did there? Much more interesting.
3. The Skin: Break Out Some Color
The final category to infuse vitality into otherwise dry academic writing is the finishing touch: adjectives and adverbs. Instead of employing mundane descriptors in our work, see what happens when we sprinkle unique words into our academic writing:
From the scanty evidence that exists, it seems the giant nocturnal water ape resides in the steamy swamps of southern Alabama. It is seldom witnessed. In his report, Dr. James states that only two people have actually glimpsed this creature, which is reported to hunt and devour local wildlife.
Without a strong skeleton, we can’t stand. Without muscles, we can’t move. And without skin, well, we’d be interesting all right, but not the kind of interesting we’re going for.
And there you have it: three components to creative academic writing. (Bet you didn’t imagine seeing those two words in the same sentence!)
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