Every student at Princeton lives their own unique experience, but if there’s one thing all Princeton students have in common, it’s that we all need to know how to write academically. The only required class for all Princeton students, first-year writing seminar, is a rite of passage. Later on, students of nearly every single major must complete independent work, writing their junior papers and senior theses; when writing these, knowing how to effectively communicate your findings is an essential skill. Here, I’ll talk about some strategies for getting a handle on academic writing, which I hope you’ll find useful!
- Take advantage of the Writing Program’s Resources
Princeton’s Writing Program is well known as being the department that administers the fabled first-year Writing Seminar. Writing Sem was one of my favorite classes that I’ve taken at Princeton, and certainly—in my mind—the most useful. But there’s no denying that it’s a lot of work, with students having to submit drafts and revisions for three separate research papers. Similarly, upperclass students working on their junior papers and senior theses also find themselves writing a lot. With so much required academic writing throughout your time at Princeton, it’s only natural that you should be looking for advice and ways to improve.
Luckily, there’s a place where you can seek advice and assistance: the Writing Center! The Writing Center offers free 1:1 conferences with Writing Center Fellows—many of whom are your peers—who can help you out with whatever daunting academic writing task you face. While I’ll spend the rest of this post describing my own tips and pieces of advice, don’t just stop here—go take advantage of the many resources that exist in the wider Princeton world!
- Understand the “scholarly conversation”
If you haven’t heard the term “scholarly conversation” before, you clearly haven’t taken Writing Sem. The term is a favorite in the Writing Program, and for good reason. I won’t describe it as eloquently as a Writing Sem instructor might, but the “scholarly conversation” essentially refers to the work of previous scholars on a given academic topic. Their scholarship doesn’t exist in a vacuum: in any academic journal article or essay, the authors are constantly referring to previous work and describing how their own work fits with or challenges previous paradigms and findings. For any piece of academic writing you create, it’s essential that you construct an appropriate scholarly conversation. You can make the work of diverse scholars from different disciplines “speak” to each other, and then describe how your own novel ideas and findings synergize with that conversation. To do this, it’s essential that you invest a lot of time into research. I won’t go into research tips in this article (that’s a whole different conversation), but research is also an integral part of academic writing.
- Be concise
Concision is an important, and often underappreciated skill in many different contexts: one being academic writing. Years ago, as a young and callow early high school student, I thought the key to writing a good essay was to use as many big and flowery words as possible. Why use one word when twenty could do? In academic contexts, this is exactly the trap you want to avoid. The point of academic writing is to communicate an idea efficiently and effectively: sadly, literary beauty and sesquipedalianism are not conducive to that purpose. So, focus on writing crisp, efficient sentences without extraneous verbiage—every sentence and every word should have a purpose. It’s a skill that I’m not great at either!
- Avoid the trap of jargon
With your newfound research in the obscure, niche academic field you’ve suddenly become an expert on for your academic paper, it might be tempting to go all-in to demonstrate your expertise. And what better way to do so by using as much jargon as possible? While I perhaps exaggerate people’s intentions here, unfortunately many people fall into the trap—subconsciously—of using field-specific jargon. While specialized readers in your audience might know what you’re talking about, this has the great disadvantage of obscuring the points you’re trying to make to general readers.
Hopefully these tips are helpful in your academic writing journey. Happy writing!
– Advik Eswaran, Natural Sciences Correspondent
