Guidance on writing

How to approach academic writing

One of the biggest challenges in the world of academia is to get your writing style just right. At the start you may be frustrated by doing good technical work but not getting the marks for it. I can’t fix that problem in this document! What I can do is give you some simple guidance which will hopefully help you to start. It’s unrealistic to hope to be doing perfect academic writing as you begin a course, but you need to be competent at the end of your program of study.

The starting point is always when you are assigned a piece of work. You may be asked to

1. Create a research document as if you were working in industry

2. Create a specific industry document

3. Write an academic paper

4. Create a cheat sheet or walkthrough for a work task

5. Create a laboratory report

6. Create a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

These are all completely different things, and you will treat them different ways. If you understand how to approach them, you should be able to judge how to approach other variations of documents which might be assigned. At this level, we avoid being prescriptive, we leave a lot of room for interpretation and there are very many different, “right” answers. The first thing to do is to read the assignment text and parse it.

• Exactly what is being looked for?

• Is there a marking rubric?

• If not, have the deliverables been specified (because if they have, you have found your rubric!!).

A rubric is a marking scheme or guide which lets us mark student work in an objective and repeatable fashion. The lecturer wants to ensure that no matter who marks your work, they will give it the same grade.

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