How To Write Your Academic Research in Engaging Ways

How To Write Your Academic Research in Engaging Ways
There is an enormous amount of academic and scientific text available for readers these days. In this sea of choices, how does an author make his or her drop of wisdom stand out and win a desirable audience? The simple answer is to make your scholarly writing engaging and relevant to the readers you hope to attract, including those all-important acquisitions editors, but achieving this in practice is no simple matter, particularly when maintaining the integrity of your research is a consideration, as it always must be in the best scholarly writing.

Choosing to focus your research on trendy topics and explore them through innovative methodology will always be appealing, and all the more so if you can also arrive at compelling, surprising or particularly desirable results. Unfortunately, much of the hard work of research and scholarship even in the most fashionable areas tends to be far less glamorous, at least to the eyes of readers, though such research may be equally important and even supply the vital groundwork for the more appealing developments in a field of study. For this reason, the goal of the scholarly author is often to present his or her research in an attractive way in the absence of the most attention-grabbing topics, methods and findings. Fortunately, there are some reliable strategies that will help you produce excellent writing and engage the interested audience you hope to win.

For one, try to think like the readers you hope will find your work fascinating and useful. This does not mean that you should neglect your own priorities, but blending those priorities with those of your readers, which may be somewhat or very different, is a sound policy. For example, based on the range and specialisation of a journal and the articles it has recently published in your subject area, reflect on what that journal’s acquisitions editor and its readers would find most interesting about your paper, and highlight those aspects. Alternatively, consider what individuals suffering from the symptoms or consequences of the problem your work investigates might be thinking and feeling, and then incorporate that knowledge to help make your research engaging and relevant for them. Scholars often anticipate the responses of their peers, especially the peer reviewers who will assess their work prior to publication, but keeping the needs and responses of other readers firmly in mind as you write is also essential.

Another reliable strategy is to construct the report of your research as a narrative, using a few brushstrokes of suspense and drama if possible. Every project has a story, and your job as an academic or scientific author is to tell that story in a clear, thorough, sophisticated and interesting way. Such an approach has the benefit of helping you focus on the process of your research while creating a text that will appeal to scholarly colleagues as well as more general readers. Following some of the practices of good fiction can be useful: try to hook your reader in your abstract and introduction, complicate the plot of your research as you present your methods and results, and provide resolution through thoughtful conclusions and significant implications and recommendations. It is surprising how many readers who might have skipped from the abstract to the results and conclusions will actually read the whole article when it is written as a compelling narrative.