Academic writing has special characteristics in terms of grammatical features and lexical items. Therefore, it is important that you start with building blocks of knowledge (characteristics of academic writing and lexical items relevant to the students' courses of study. Secondly, we can start giving a model (text modelling) for the students to be familiar with the format. Next, we can ask the students to write similar texts in groups ly (joint construction of text) and finally, we can ask them to construct a text individually for assesment.    

Greates book I ever read: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Social-Scientists-Chicago-Publishing/dp/0226041328/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490930937&sr=8-1&keywords=writing+for+the+social+sciences

I advocate Maria's response to be pedagogically useful as we can note that she strategically inducts her students rather than imparting to the students the required form, format and structure of academic writing. Her teaching method eases off the tension from the students by introducing them to the academic writing with an example of what they can and must replicate. 

Hope this conference paper can be of help to you as academic writing is the foundation for success in HE.

Best regards,

Debra

Conference Paper Academic Supporting Strategies for Students' Graduate Research

Dear Krishna, I would major on paragraph writing, argumentation and structuring. Have a look at my article on essay writing on 10 keywords.

Dear Krishna, I think writing must proceed reading. Give the learners some well written articles to read and always give group task on writing as group dynamics is very useful for developing analytical skills. Usually asking them to improve on their earlier versions of same article again and again can be very helpful.

 Dear  Scholars

 Thank you for sharing wonderful ideas. You have shown me boundless possibilities in teaching academic writing.

I am much excited to read your answers. I will definitely try your ideas in my teaching.  My students are developing a survey on their  classmates study habits. They will write their first paper using the data from this survey.

 Mostly, we teach with traditional lecture methods. It is hard to get on their habit of writing. I know that writing cannot be developed with out writing.

 How do you develop your students habits of writing?

I am also expecting more resources to sharpen my and my students writing skills.

 Kind regards

Krishna

Hi Krishna. Teaching academic writing can be a daunting task. Attached are my papers that can assist you in the teaching of writing.

Article The Effect of Incorporating Multiliteracies Pedagogy in ESL Writing.

Article Engaging ESL Students in the Writing Classroom through the M...

Dear Krishna:

Let me start by congratulating you for bringing the issue of academic (and scientific) writing to discussion among RG members. This is indeed a highly, albeit overlooked, important issue in academia, refers it to colleges or universities. Suffice it to say that several submissions are rejected because they are not written according to the standards of academic writing that are required for any prestigious journal. I even think that academic writing should be a mandatory discipline or module in academia all over the world.  

What are useful strategies for teaching academic writing? There are a lot of them as is visible in previous answers. What strategies do I use to help students to deal with this issue? I generally ask to my students, namely graduate students, to choose a topic in which they are really interested. After this choice, I ask them to  write, in groups of three, a manuscript no longer than 15 pages which could be submitted for consideration to publication at least in a national journal. Then I urge them:

(1) To write in a clear and clean language, which generally requires to make short sentences without language or scientific mistakes.  On this occasion, I remember them that academic and scientific writing is at odds with redundancy and conceptual confusion. They easily get the idea that, for example, a manuscript or an experiment written or carried out in an atmosphere of conceptual confusion rarely, if ever, clarifies anything.

(2) To substantiate with appropriate references or examples the main sentences or points that appear in the manuscript. They easily get the idea that affirmed, but not substantiated, sentences are, say, authoritarian, not authoritative, sentences. 

(3) To make it clear the articulation between the several sentences, paragraphs, and parts of the manuscript. Students easily get the idea that when this is not the case, manuscripts have an eclectic flavor that is inconsistent with academic and  scientific writing and publishing.

(4) To include an abstract, main key-words, the main test and a conclusion section.

(5) To check the correspondence between the references in the body of the text and the References section.

(6) To make references according to the requirements of the focal journal.

(7) To try to raise "irritating" questions or  doubts. "Irritating" questions or  doubts are those whose response leads to a better knowledge of the topic at issue.

After all of this, I give to the several groups of students a published paper in the focal journal. Then, I discuss with each group the main differences in terms of form and content between their manuscript and the published paper. In all this process I am more a mentor than a simple transmitter of knowledge or ready-made truths. Students have then an opportunity to improve the quality of their manuscripts such that they could be submitted to the focal  journal. Actually, some of these manuscripts have been published in national, but peer-review journals.

Best regards

I would take a binary approach. First is to give the student academic papers of the desired style and intellectual weight, for them to read. They should examine the structure of the texts and broaden their vocabulary to build a lexicon of academic language. Secondly, take them back to real high school basics by teaching basic essay structure in the TEEL form: Thesis statement/Topic sentence, Explain, Example and Link back to the question. It's really basic, but a safe place to start. They write the essay conforming to this structure as a first draft, just to get their basic ideas on paper. Then they redraft, applying structural ideas and language that they have learned from the papers they read. In the second draft they also extend the TEEL format, building on the first draft four sentence paragraph structure in order to discuss their ideas at a more sophisticated level. Hope this helps!

Krishna,

I consider academic writing more as an art (to be learned over time) and less a science (to be taught and memorised). It is by writing and writing several drafts and manuscripts that the art is learned and perfected. Like journalists, good academic writers develop a liking for writing so that writing becomes a sort of "way of life". With time, they write quite well and their written works are quite enjoyable to read. What should we do to train good academic writers?

(1) They should have an interest in writing. If they hate writing, they may never be patient to horn their writing skills which are gathered over time. Learning academic writing continues, even after graduating out of college, and requires self-drive and self-motivation. 

(2) They should identify an academic mentor. A mentor should be an accomplished writer whom the student admires or looks up to. Either the mentor is an authority in the research topic, or he/she is an excellent writer.

(3) They should be flexible to produce several drafts of their manuscripts. Each successive draft should improve on the previous ones.

(4) They should understand that all writing is about telling a story. In journalism, it is telling a story by explaining what happened or is happening, why and perhaps what can be done. In academic writing, the story is told by falling back to a "scientific protocol" - using scientific approaches and concepts. But there has to be a thread that runs through the entire manuscript. The story should be able to be explained to be understood by even non-technical audiences.

(5) Good writers are made, they are not born and good writing is like wine. Wine becomes tastier the longer it ferments. Good writers "allow their writing skills" to undergo some fermentation. Therefore, a Sophomore student should not expect to write like an accomplished professor over one night.

 Dear Scholars

Thank you very much for more comprehensive answers. I also hope you will provide me useful resources on teaching academic writing.

 Regards

 Krishna

1. Encourage Students to Read Diverse Texts

Reading and then thinking and talking about different genres is a robust sequence for learning academic language.

2. Introduce Summary Frames

Summarizing is a simple and fail-safe approach to academic language activities. Students read a section of text to themselves before verbally summarizing the passage to a partner.

Hi,

I spend a lot of time teaching my students to write in the style of my field (psychology), and have developed some tools you may find useful even in other areas.

First, I have students get in the habit of writing something in class every day at the beginning and end of class.  This is not meant to be academic style writing, but writing about what they're learning or have learned.  The idea is to get them used to the task, and to connecting thoughts to words on a page.

For the more formal writing, I have a semester-long project that I've broken into parts to allow them to learn how to write a scientific paper bit by bit.  You can see an example of this on my website for general psychology at http://williamaltman.info/Courses/PSY_110/PSY_110_Research%20Assignments.html .  Each of the assignments is designed to become part of the next assignment, yet is graded on its own. This allows the students to make continual improvements in their work for each phase of the project.  Also, each phase comes with links to several sample papers that earned excellent grades and were posted by permission of their authors.  As well, I post the scoring rubric for each paper with the samples. so that students will know for what I am looking.  In class, we go over at least one sample and the grade sheets before each assignment.  And before the first assignment I have them practice reading scientific articles and looking at how they're constructed.  For group work, there is also a rating sheet on which students can rate their own and each other's contributions to the project (it's near the bottom of the page).

Because I want the students to concentrate on their thinking and writing, and not worry so much about the basics of formatting, I also include a template (near the bottom of the left-side navigation) in APA style, into which they can paste or type their own text.  For PowerPoint or Poster presentations, I also provide templates (in line with the assignments) for the same reason.

There is also a link to some tools for writers at http://williamaltman.info/Writing_Tools.html and of these I highly recommend using the "V" diagram (see left navigation on that page).  It provides an excellent template for thinking about scientific writing.

Be well,

Bill

The steps of technology and evaluation in electronic academic writing are as follows:

1) Referencing online publications, conference messages and websites

2) Technology and plagiarism

3) Multimedia assignments

Best Regards Krishna Prasad Parajuli

The following publications should be helpful, particularly : Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer; the recommended books on writing (see: Pollock and Bono, 2013, p. 633); the clear-writing recipes (see: Ragins, 2012, p. 499), etc.

• Barley, S. R. (2006) When I write my masterpiece: Thoughts on what makes a paper interesting, Academy of Management Journal, 49, 1, pp. 16-20.
• Caulley, D. N. (2008) Making Qualitative Research Reports Less Boring: The Techniques of Writing Creative Nonfiction, Qualitative Inquiry, 14, 3, pp. 424-449.
• Clark, R. P. C. (2008) Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Verlag: Little, Brown and Company.
• Cloutier, C. (2016) How I write: An inquiry into the writing practices of academics, Journal of Management Inquiry, 25, 1, pp. 69-84.
• Pollock, T. G. and Bono, J. E. (2013) Being Scheherazade: The importance of storytelling in academic writing [From the Editors], Academy of Management Journal, 56, 3, pp. 629-634.
• Ragins, B. R. (2012) Editor's comments: Reflections on the craft of clear writing, Academy of Management Review, 37, 4, pp. 493-501.

The essentials of paragraph writing is key to academic writing. Topic sentence of a paragraph has to be clear. Then supporting sentences should expand and elaborate the topic sentence well. If students can write good paragraphs, it helps in getting a good essay.

I agree with Maria Nicholas.

Thanks Krishna Prasad Parajuli.