Academic Writing

     I'm going to be honest, when I first saw all that I had to read in this academic article, I thought I was going to fall asleep, especially after reading the first few sentences. The diction was so formal, and my first impression was that it was going to be a drag reading it. I was surprised to see myself enjoying this article, and I was actually really focused on it. I think a big part of it is because I knew that her advice was going to directly help me in my writing, and considering she is very educated and qualified to be writing about this, I wanted to make sure I took in everything she said.

     It certainly was not an easy read. As I mentioned previously, the diction was hard to understand at times, and looking up words disrupted the flow of my reading. Also, there were words that were joined into unique phrases which I had not seen before, so I had to stop and think a lot about what exactly they were saying. Another challenging aspect was the integration of long quotations and passages taken from the articles she was citing. She was trying to prove a point with them, so instead of simply reading the quotations, you had to read them with an analytical mindset. How does this prove her point? So you definitely had to be on your toes while reading this.

     In terms of having a voice of authority, I found it interesting that many authors chose to use first person. Using first person was a huge writing sin at my high school in pretty much all writing assignments, especially essays, so I was really surprised to see how common it was. Thonney also points out that most of these writers choose to use the active voice, a contrast to the engineers she cites. Teachers constantly preached to us the importance of utilizing the active voice, so that comes as no surprise.

     Another point that caught my attention was the way in which academic papers tell the audience the plan for their paper, laying out exactly what, and in what order, they will discuss topics. We always wrote out a thesis statement, which listed things that supported our main argument, and it was assumed that we would follow the order listed in the thesis. But it was one sentence, while Thonney cites papers that list the order in which topics will appear in multiple sentences, using words such as "first", "second", and "third", which was seen as childish by teachers.

     It was interesting to see how formal, but at the same time, informal, many academic writings are. The phrases that are specific to the discipline being written about and the numerical representations and images highlight how formal it gets, while the use of the first person and listing things, as mentioned earlier, emphasize the fact that academic writing isn't as formal as it sounds. Perhaps these things are surprising me because of the specific way I was instructed to write throughout the last 12 years. Nevertheless, this article was really helpful in telling me what I should use to make my academic writing more effective; some of it seemed like review for me, but most of it was really enlightening.