A variety of factors might contribute to young people having a difficult time in college. In this regard, the educational process is not an exception to the general rule. Students get frightened as soon as the word “academic” is spoken in the context of writing assignments or assignments requiring research.  

Producing a strong and high-quality report is dependent on your ability to be mindful of what you are doing while writing. The ability to write properly should be taught to children at a young age since it will be a talent that they will rely on for many years to come. It takes time, though, to build these abilities, and you don’t have that luxury at the beginning of your first semester in college. 

Researchers in academic writing have discovered a variety of challenges with student learning, including students’ inability to comprehend the skills of the course, and teachers’ dissatisfaction with the outcomes of their students’ efforts. These facts can easily explain the sharp increase in custom paper writing service usage, that can be observed in this sphere of knowledge. An increasing number of papers have been published in the literature in which the writers raise concerns regarding the suitability and efficacy of implementing the practice of academic writing that has been adopted from the Western educational environment in our institutions of higher learning. That is why we decided to look at it from a different perspective and observe academic writing as a complex discipline.  

WHAT IS ACADEMIC WRITING DISCIPLINE? 

Three semesters of “Academic Reading and Writing” are offered at the Northern (Arctic) Federal University’s undergraduate level, and the course includes both lecture and practical components.  

As a starting point, the amount of information available to students in our culture has expanded to the point that they require aid in organizing and understanding it, and this trend is particularly visible in university programs today. Among other things, clip thinking is frequently regarded as the defining characteristic of the younger generation since it is associated with a lack of ability to evaluate data logically, interpret written language, formulate one’s own opinion, and in general, cognitive reduction.  

Third, and probably most importantly, the current geopolitical situation exerts a burden on institutions of higher learning, particularly those in developing countries. Universities are tasked with enhancing the state’s international competitiveness while also supporting knowledge-based economic development at home in these conditions. 

Students must master a range of skills to write a research paper, including the capacity to produce a piece of writing, communicate their research perspective and findings, and ensure that the article is published in a high-ranking journal. As part of the university’s overall endeavor to attain this goal, a new course in academic writing is being offered as part of the curriculum. The capacity of a firm to publish is a significant indicator in establishing its competitiveness since it indicates how well it is run. 

WHY DO STUDENTS NEED IT? 

Academic literacy is a term that is commonly associated with the process of writing an academic paper. It is necessary to have metalinguistic abilities to master research writing skills in the setting of research writing. Critical thinking and the ability to educate oneself are all part of this, as well as the ability to communicate across cultures using English as the language of international communication. An emphasis is placed on the significance of acquiring a culturally-appropriate way of thinking in addition to “proper” reading and writing abilities. 

Students should benefit from learning the course of academic writing as a consequence of their efforts. They should: 

  1. Know: 
  • scientific (academic) texts are constructed as integral systems, and the fundamental principles of nonlinear production of a scientific (academic) book are discussed; 
  • the key differences between a scientific document and journalistic or creative writing; 
  • norms and standards for a scientific work that are recognized internationally; 

2. Be able to: 

  •  structure and arrange the text’s parts in a sensible way; 
  • use numerous academic writing models and technology throughout the text’s development; 
  • engage in conversation with the reader, acknowledge and appreciate another’s point of view 
  • develop one’s theory and support it with evidence, and then build a text from the hypotheses to the conclusions; 
  • information from a variety of sources should be properly evaluated, selected, summarized, and used; 
  • explore their path of evidence-based on logic and facts, while avoiding different forms of plagiarism, in an unbiased, objective, and reasonable manner; 
  • several forms of logical order and argumentation procedures should be employed;  
  • composing a document that is both syntactically and logically coherent; 
  • concise and precise words in which to communicate your views 

3. Possess skills in: 

  • technologies for coming up with your concepts; 
  • constructing text based on models; 
  • paraphrase and citation; 
  • constructing writing that is cohesive and logically organized; 
  • when analyzing an academic paper, consider the criteria for evaluating one’s own and someone else’s text; 
  • сorrection of syntactic and logical faults that are complicated.  

The list of skills and abilities is frighteningly long.  If a course is offered that makes use of a temporary resource to give teaching to students in a diverse range of disciplines that need a diverse range of abilities and expertise, how does the institution intend to include this course? If considerable research is required as part of the master’s program curriculum, it should be expected that a similar course will be provided as part of the bachelor’s degree program as well. As a result, students joining a master’s program should already be prepared to write scientific papers, although with the assistance of a faculty member who will serve as their supervisor. 

WHY IS IT A HARD ONE FOR STUDENTS? 

There have been several books and articles written on the subject of academic writing teaching at the university level. It is possible to classify the difficulties that students have when learning how to write academically into the following categories: 

  1. language skills that are undeveloped, such as poor word choice, improper terminology, and a lack of acquaintance with fundamental grammar and punctuation; 
  2. using parallel syntactic structures and connecting elements, as well as the use of “empty” or ineffective words, are all instances of stylistic challenges; 
  3. insufficient knowledge of text organization skills at the level of a paragraph and a whole text; 
  4. failure to demonstrate effective reasoning skills; 
  5. a lack of logical reasoning and critical analysis 
  6. difficulties with the methodology of scientific research; 
  7. lack of familiarity with the genre of a scientific publication, or with the format of a scientific article; 
  8. the difficulties associated with adhering to publication conventions.  

The most serious issue, in our opinion, is the overcrowding of the courses themselves. Both students and teachers are overwhelmed by the large number of learning tasks that must be completed to grasp the abilities of academic writing. The only way out of this predicament is by a multilevel strategy that splits the discipline into three distinct stages: Each final output has its text within the genre of academic writing, which is distinct from the others.