Academic writing

Academic writing, also known as scholarly writing, is nonfiction that is produced as part of academic work. It includes reports on empirical fieldwork or research conducted in facilities for the natural sciences or social sciences, monographs in which scholars analyse culture, propose new theories, or develop interpretations from archives, as well as undergraduate versions of all of these types of writing.

Even though academic writing differs in tone, style, content, and organisation depending on the genre and publication method, nearly all academic writing is characterised by a relatively formal prose register, frequent examples to other academic study, and the use of relatively stable rhetorical moves to define the project scope, situate it in the relevant research, and advance a new contribution.

Prose register in academic writing is often characterised by "evidence...that the writer(s) has been persistent, open-minded and disciplined in study," that prioritises "reason over emotion or sensual perception," and that imagines a reader who is "coolly rational, reading for information, and intending to formulate a rational reply," according to conventional wisdom. The specific aesthetic techniques by which these norms are achieved might range significantly depending on the academic field. These distinctions help explain the various tones of, for example, historical writing vs engineering writing or physics versus philosophy writing, among other things. It is known as the notion of "discourse communities" and it is an effort to account for these variances in writing styles.

It has been proposed by Biber and Gray that there are considerable disparities in the complexity of academic writing in the humanities and science, with humanities writing often focusing on structural elaboration and sciences writing frequently focusing on structural compression.