Academic writing is writing texts for academic scientific purposes. In the video you will find out more on what is considered academic writing.

The characteristics of academic and scientific texts are:

• Having a basis on scientific facts
• Reliability
• Accuracy
• Systematicness
• Criticism
• Proper structure

In the video you will learn more about what the purpose of writing a scientific paper is.

Types of academic text:

• Essays
• Paper/Thesis: seminar, graduation, master, doctoral
• Book preview
• Research/ scientific work (academic article or monograph)
• Presentation at science conventions
• Scientifically educational text
• Scientifically popular text

The first seminar papers

The purpose of writing a science paper is researching something you’re interested in, in the area of your studies and presenting the results of your research. In the video you will find out more about what is expected of you when you’re assigned to write your first paper and the first steps you should take.

For some of the papers you’ll write during your studies you will be able to choose the subject matter on your own, whilst in other cases the topic will be given to you beforehand. In both cases you have to follow the rules of academic writing.

Before you begin writing your paper, you need to introduce yourself to the literature related to the topic and minutely analyze the results of your research. Researching and reading literature are done simultaneously. While reading, you should carefully take notes.

Method of writing a seminar paper

Scientific papers should have a proper structure. For that reason in your seminar paper you need to make a basic text structure. The acronym IMRAD is often used to show the common structure of scientific papers. According to that structure the paper should consist of the following parts:

• The title of the paper which should display the essence of the content of the paper and to be clear.
• The abstract
• I (Introduction) – an introduction where you’re going to specify what and why, i.e. the objective of the paper, to point out the importance of the problem, define and formulate the problem, review the previous literature, and the thesis which you’re striving to present in your paper
• M (Methods) – the method in which you’re going to present how and when i.e. to describe in detail the ways you carried out the work, case of research and the method you used in your study, the sources of the data you gathered
• R (Results) – in this section you’re reporting the results you got while researching
• A (Analysis) and D ( Discussion) – an analysis and discussion about the obtained results and problems and as a part of that you will interpret and compare the empirical structure, argued with the help of the literature that you had read, linking your results with the theoretical concepts and other literature or empirical research.
• Conclusion: In this section you’re not to recount the results, but to provide a concise overview of the paper and suggest its contribution and connect it with the introduction in order to get a coherent whole.