STEPS TO MAKE A GOOD ACADEMIC WRITING

Retno Citro / 1806270085

Bachelor of Nursing Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia

E-mail: rerocitro70@gmail.com

Academic writing is a particularly used in formal essays and other assessments

for your course. It requires formal language, a logical structure and should be supported
by evidence. Academic writing is, essentially, the writing you have to do for your university
courses. Your instructors may have different names for academic writing assignments (essay,
paper, research paper, term paper, argumentative paper/essay, analysis paper/essay,
informative essay, position paper), but all of these assignments have the same goal and
principles. Academic writing must give information very clearly to readers. The audiences can
not directly get the fast response from writer. There is no section to give a question if the
readers not clear about the information. Academic writing will develop skills in researching,
evaluating information, organizing, arguing, responding to others’ arguments, analyzing,
and expressing yourself clearly in writing (in English too). A good academic writing will
make readers enjoy about your papers. So, it is very important to know how to make a
good academic writing. There are 5 (seven) steps to make a good academic writing,
analyse your prompt, gather your information by research or reading, think your thesis,
organize your material, and draft your essay.

First step, analyse your prompt. Define your purpose in your essay. You must
find systematic or methodical way of categorizing or define your topic (Setiawan, 2018).
The topic that you choose must make others interested. In this section you must
understand about a topic and the phenomenon, and you explain the reason why you
choose this topic. After that you must analyse the key words in the prompt. Some words
are significant and will need to be defined as part of your essay.
 Second step, gather your information by research and reading. In this step,
before you write the essay, you must get many information and research about your
topic. The data must support about your argumentation. Your extensive knowledge will
help you to combined about the data and the phenomenon. The research divided into 2
types, there are: primary research and secondary research. Primary research can get
the information through interview, questionnaire, survey, and laboratory experiments.
Secondary research is gathering from reading, like reading the book, newspaper,
journals, and article.

Third step, think your thesis. The thesis statement is the most important
sentence in your paper. If someone asked you, “What does your paper say?” your
answer would be your thesis statement. Everything you write will support this statement.
A good thesis statement usually include: main idea of the paper, your opinion or point of
few, purpose of the paper, answer the research question, an element of surprise, and
clarity. It’s useful to have a thesis idea at the beginning to help you focus, but it’s also
OK to change your thesis statement as you go through the writing process and learn
and think more about your topic (Setiawan, 2018).

Fourth step, organize your material. In the introduction, you will give brief
background to the topic, state your thesis, outline your main points, and provide
transition into body paragraphs. Body paragraphs provide a topic sentence which says
what the main point of each paragraph. Body paragraph show some critical thinking ,
tell the readers what you think, and provide in the text citations for your information.

Fifth step draft your essay. A basic outline is your first attempt to organize the
ideas of your paper. It will help you focus your research and consider the order of your
ideas. To make one: Choosing and ordering points like: Write your question and
answer (preliminary thesis statement). Don’t worry about writing a beautiful, memorable,
strong thesis statement yet; just a simple answer to your question is enough to start the
basic outline. Breaking sections into smaller parts: Those are very basic outlines. It
is possible to add more to them, especially after a little research. For each section, think
of how much support you have. If you have a lot of supporting details (facts, examples,
expert opinions) and explanations, then you will need more than one paragraph for that
section. Some sections, especially your strongest, need more than one paragraph,
while others may have only one.

Academic writing is very important to write formal paper very clearly, no doubt,
attractive, and interest for readers. Making a good academic writing have 5 simple from
introduction until conclusion. Students in university must master about this skill
(academic writing) in their classes. Student must have habit to write, analyse, about the
phenomenon.

References:
Whitaker, A. (2009). Academic writing guide 2010. Retrieved from:
http://www.vsm.sk/Curriculum/academicsupport/academicwritingguide.pdf.
Setiawan, A. (2018). Writing an academic essay. [PowerPoint slides].