Academic writing is fundamental to student learning outcomes. Academic writing entails students’ ability to articulate thoughts into comprehensible and well-structured text material. Moreover, academic writing paves the way to enter into good universities, prospering STEM and non-STEM carriers. Some effective ways to help students learn the skill of fluent academic writing are:
1. Let students know the value of academic writing: If students know the importance of academic writing, they will be keener to improve it. This will also give them internal motivation to improve their skills.
2. Regularly assign brief writing assignments in class: As is popularly said, practice leads to perfection. Assign your students with writing assignments regularly and provide them quality feedback on their submission. Talk about ideas, content, organization, tone, sentence fluency, coherence, concision, grammar, etc. while providing your students feedback on their writing.
3. Guide students on how to write good quality academic papers: Teach your students the value of brainstorming, outlines and notes. Explain to them how to select and narrow a topic, and critique the first draft. Teach them about academic ethics like avoiding plagiarism and citing while referencing. Help your students identify, writer’s key activities:
• Developing ideas
• Finding a focus and a thesis
• Composing a draft
• Getting feedback and comments from others
• Revising the draft by expanding ideas, clarifying meaning, reorganizing
• Editing
• Presenting the finished work to readers
4. Encourage students to read. Reading helps students increase their vocabulary and learn how things can be best said. You can provide them with a list of books, articles and essays and it will help them learn about vocabulary, sentence structure, and the overall outlook to the content.
