Academic Writing Struggles are Common for Students and Faculty

Academic Writing is a distinct genre of writing that takes time to master. You may be a phenomenal creative or business writer who writes in a flowery manner, a direct, “less is more” style or for audiences who want the bottom line up front. Changing these styles to academic writing requires training.

 

Yet, most graduate programs don’t offer scholarly writing courses to acclimate advanced students to the new level of writing expected of them. In addition, most faculty members aren’t trained in providing constructive writing critique or teaching academic writing. So, many graduate students fear disclosing to faculty that they don’t understand how to improve their writing.

While some scholars pick up a scholarly style in their programs, have a mentor to help or invest in writing coaching, most advanced degree holders do the best to figure out how to write by themselves. In the process, they fail to meet faculty and program expectations. This quandary traps too many doctoral students in the “ABD” (All But Dissertation) stage unnecessarily. 

Many who finish their dissertation and graduate haven’t learned how to repeatedly or intentionally produce sound academic writing. The result? Advanced degree holders silently struggle to get published in academic arenas. As a post-doc or faculty member, you feel ill-equipped to compete against peers to publish or secure funding, face repeated journal article rejection or one revise and submit request after another.

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With the advent of generative AI, the temptation is to offload the bulk of scholarly writing to artificial intelligence. While understandable, this offloading prevents scholars from developing confidence in their authentic research voice.