What is the biggest challenge to mastering academic writing

Question

What is the biggest challenge to mastering academic writing (like, all those essays you have to write)?

Answer 1

Hi Murphy,

That's a great question! The biggest challenge my students experienced when I was teaching at Oxford University was questioning assumptions. Quite often, essay prompts provided by professors have nuanced assumptions buried within them, either intentionally or subconsciously, and the best essays acknowledge and break down those assumptions while answering the question or prompt. I always say, "question the question."

As someone who has graded countless essays and papers at the University of Oxford, I'd love to support you when you do start writing those college essays and papers. These can be daunting at first, but with the right strategies and approaches tailored to how you learn best, writing winning essays can become much easier and even fun!

All the best and good luck with your academic endeavors,

Anna

Answer 2

I can think of three from my own experience: choosing a topic, getting started, and procrastinating.

Choosing a topic - Assuming that you have some latitude with this, think of a topic that really interests or excites you, that you have personal experience with, or that you are genuinely curious about.

Getting started - I think it is often difficult to decide how to begin your essay. Something that can help is to just free write and do a “brain dump” of everything related to your topic that pops into your head. Don’t worry about perfection at this stage. The point is to just let your ideas flow freely. The hope is that you can then look back at what you wrote and think of how to include it in your essay, or in some cases you may decide it really isn’t relevant.

Procrastination - In my opinion, this is often the end result when you struggle to choose a topic and/or get started. It can be helpful to map out the due date of the essay on a calendar, then work backwards from that date and break the task into chunks. For example — On this day, I will choose my topic, on that day I will free write, on another day I will evaluate what I free wrote and start the actual writing, on this day I will complete my draft, on that day I will proofread and edit.

Answer 3

That is a good question. Challenges differ for a variety of students in terms of academic writing. Some students have writer's block regarding how to organize their paragraph structure. For instance, some students struggle with writing their introductions because they have to spend time thinking about how they can grab their reader's attention with their hook and how to transition to the background information on their topic before stating their thesis. Others may not have carefully read their prompt and have gone off-topic. Even though some students may have read the prompt, they steer off course when the evidence (quotes) they choose does not support their claim and the overall prompt. However, I think the most challenging aspect for students to master academic writing is explaining their evidence. From my experience in high school, my teachers would tell the class that their students are great at choosing quotes but have trouble explaining their evidence (the "so what" part). Some students find this part difficult because they think quotes speak for themselves when it is not true. In their elaboration, they must explain how and why the quote supports their topic sentence and in their significance (last sentence(s) of their body paragraph), they must explain why the quote is important and why it supports their claim made in their thesis. For example, when a student quotes a scientific study that shows that the sky is blue due to the scattering of blue light, the student cannot write their elaboration like this: "The sky is blue because the sky is blue." Instead, the student should write, "This scientific study shows that the sky is blue because gas molecules in Earth's atmosphere scatter blue light due to its shorter wavelength." If the student is making a claim that Rayleigh scattering plays a role in making the sky look blue, then the significance part should be written like this: "Rayleigh scattering plays a role in making the sky look blue because when the sun emits its white light, which is made up of a variety of colors, the blue light is scattered by air molecules."