Academic Writing Hub

Introduction

It is important for anyone studying at university to develop the discourse competence to communicate and participate effectively within the academic community they are joining. This discourse competence includes understanding the identities, values, attitudes, texts and writing approach of this community (whether it be a community of medical historians or material scientists). As active participants in your subject community, you should look to develop your own distinctive voice and identity within your writing and, over time, develop the ability to contribute to its future direction.  

Written communication occupies a privileged position in the development of discourse competence owing to the importance placed on academic writing within university study and assessment. For this reason, it is important to understand the expected tasks, and reproduce the types of texts, typical to your disciplinary field.  

The resources in this Academic Writing Hub provide general guidance alongside specific textual samples. However, it is not possible to create tailored resources for all subjects studied at the University of Oxford. Thus, your challenge is to apply the resources you find here to your subject area, think critically about their relevance to your context, and adapt and supplement them as appropriate to your writing tasks. In this respect, we hope these resources are a starting point for you to reflect on your academic writing, as well as provide a basis for further discussion with your academic tutors, supervisors, subject experts, and English for Academic Purposes tutors.  

What is good academic writing?

What constitutes 'good' academic writing is much discussed, debated and contested.   Certainly, writing effectively in an academic context is a skill that needs to be continuously cultivated.  

Students often report they would like to develop their writing in areas such as:  

• Writing clearly and concisely in a manner appropriate to their discipline 
• Creating organised, cohesive and coherent texts 
• Criticality: showing evaluation, stance and voice 
• Incorporating academic sources effectively in your writing 

The Academic Writing Hub covers all of these areas and many more.

How can I improve my academic writing?

To improve your academic writing, it is necessary to focus on the 'discourse' of writing in your academic discipline, analysing the ‘how’ of academic writing alongside the ‘what’ of subject ideas, knowledge and content. One of the most important steps you can take to improve your academic writing is to start noticing the characteristic features and conventions of different academic texts in your field.  

These include:   

• how types of writing are organised differently (e.g. tutorial essay, research article, project proposal) 
• the academic language used (e.g. phrases and grammar) 
• the academic style used (e.g. level of objectivity, referencing and citation) 

The Academic Writing Hub can offer valuable general guidance on these topics, and even considers the broad disciplinary differences between writing in MPLS, the Medical Sciences, the Social Sciences & the Humanities. However, it is incumbent upon all students at Oxford to carry out their own 'genre discourse' analysis to better understand the idiosyncrasies of writing in your specific subject area or department. For some helpful tips in this regard, please visit the page Learning How to Write in My Subject Area.

How is the Academic Writing Hub Different from other Resources?

The support material in the Hub is specially tailored for students completing degree courses within Oxford’s particular collegiate environment. The Hub's writing support ranges from undergraduate papers (such as short tutorial essays and collections exams) to post-graduate writing tasks (e.g. termly essays, dissertations or doctoral theses). Unlike other academic writing resources, the samples and discussions are based around ‘texts’ written by previous Oxford student. It is believed that considering textual examples from previous students - alongside guidance from Academic Writing specialists in the University - can provide you with a valuable lens to scrutinise your own writing practices and approaches.

Contents

The Hub is presented in three sections, each of which considers Academic Writing from a somewhat different perspective:

Academic Writing Tasks

As a student at Oxford, you will likely spend much time researching, thinking about and writing a range of written academic tasks. This can range from tutorial essays, to reports, to dissertations or theses. The production of written texts addressing these tasks is likely to comprise the majority of your assessment at the University. This section considers the organisation and language used in the texts types that most common within the University.

Transferable Writing Skills

There are a number of transferable 'rhetorical categories' (such as paraphrasing, synthesising, or incorporating criticality into one's writing) that are relevant to a number of academic tasks. Sophisticated academic writers flexibly apply these rhetorical skills to a range of different written contexts. Here, you can focus on the rhetorical skills most relevant to the texts you will be writing.

Key Language Issues in Academic Writing

In the third section, we consider the language constructions that commonly presents difficulties for writers at Oxford. These syntactic or linguistic issues include conventional language patterns and collocations, verb choice, as well as the language choices that impact your academic style of writing.

Who created these resources and why?

The resources in this hub are created by language experts from the University Language Centre who specialise in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). EAP is a theory-framed, research-led academic discipline; it aims to enable students to develop the discourse competence to communicate and participate effectively in higher education as students and researchers. You can see examples of the different courses offered by EAP specialists at the Language Centre, including the tailored courses we run in collaboration with departments and colleges, on our website.

You can also discover more about the principles underlying our approach and the pedagogies we use and some examples of the literature upon which these principles are based from our ORLO reading listLinks to an external site..