Introduction
Academic writing is a form of expression that is organized, focussed and substantiated by evidence, with a formal tone of the narration. Al Badi (2015) reflected that academic writing should not be too complicated to understand and is usually used in different scholarly works and academia. However, it has long been debated to be challenging due to its nature and strict approach to presentation (that’s why so many students prefer to ask for ‘write my essay online’ assistance from reputable writing services instead of learning all the academic writing details). The purpose of this essay is to highlight and critically discuss the reasons behind considering academic writing to be challenging. While academic writing needs to be learnt for better communication of acquired knowledge; academic writing is rigidly structured, making it difficult to learn as one needs to understand the target audience and develop the practice of paraphrasing.
Critical discussion
Several researchers have argued for ages about the challenges associated with academic writing. The academic form of writing is usually longer than speeches and involves using many subordinate clauses, making it difficult to write and express the thought of an academician. In addition, as academic writing is more of a decontextualised and explicit form of expression, it is often found challenging (Biber & Gray, 2010). Substantiating the opinion, another crucial aspect identified is awareness and understanding of the audience for effective academic writing skills (Thompson, 2001). Audience awareness, while necessary, complicates the matter further as the writer has to assume the roles of the audience and comprehend the viewpoint from their perspective to ensure that the written piece is organised and easily understood by the readers. Understanding of and awareness of the readers depict the approach of presenting the information or the text (Grabe & Kaplan, 2014). In this regard, it has been debated by Kakh, Mansor & Zakaria (2014) that while assuming the role of the reader, the writer needs to take a guess about the expectation of the audience.
Emphasising the need to have sound knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, Biber & Gray (2010) added that the style of academic writing is more of nominal nature. With greater importance given to the use of nouns and other aspects of grammatical syntax, it becomes difficult compared to speech or other forms of writing. On the same ground, Song (2020) highlighted that academic writing for individuals with a second language as English is far more challenging than the writers with English as their first language. Unknown use of rhetoric in the language, alongside the grammatical issues, are making the paradigm complicated. Furthermore, paraphrasing is key to academic writing as it helps provide evidence without plagiarism. Paraphrasing is the act of representing or mirroring the same opinion as to the original idea while ensuring the construction of the sentence is not lexically the same as the original piece. However, paraphrasing is not as easy and one is faced with the challenge of producing an intertextual ability to write (Song, 2020). Poor language proficiency and lack of adequate subject knowledge are the other areas that have been identified to affect academic writing abilities (Al Fadda, 2012).
Conclusion
