Written by Xiaoshuang Luo
Writing is a learning process for anyone in the academics, no matter English is the mother language or a second language for that person.
I studied Finance and Financial Management for my bachelor’s degree in China. Before I came to the U.S., I never really wrote any academic paper in English. I did take some standard tests like TOEFL, GRE and got a little bit training in writing essays in English. But that is all of the experiences that I had before I started my graduate program three years ago in Oklahoma.
I first came to the U.S. as an exchange student in the University of Oklahoma (OU). At that time, I was a graduate student in Beijing Normal University, and I studied criminal law there. But when I came to OU, I did not go to Law School, instead, I was really interested in criminology. I took several undergraduate courses in criminology and sociology there. It was easy for me. Basically, for undergraduate courses, I do not need to write that much, although it is in the field of social science or broadly, humanities. But when I began my master program in Sociology there the year after my exchange program, I was totally overwhelmed by all the reading and writing requirements. For each semester, I took three classes and worked as a TA, plus doing research with a faculty member. Each week’s reading for just one class is around 100 pages and there are three classes. Some weeks, we read a whole book just for one class. Besides the reading, we need to write response paper for all the articles we read. Until now, I still clearly remember how frustrated I was in my first semester and how much I struggled with writing.
After I read all the articles, usually it is a lot, I cannot exactly remember what the main point in the article is. What often happens is that I need to read the articles several times, even sometimes I need to read line by line, word by word to digest, absorb, and understand. Then goes to the writing process, which actually is even harder. Reading is easy compared to writing since we need to express our own ideas through written language. English is not my first language. At the beginning of the master program, I always think in Chinese and then translate to English. But it causes a lot of problems, it is time consuming, not efficient, and the writing is awful. My first year in the graduate program at OU,I never went to bed before 2 am.
I talked a lot about my personal experience, which sounds like frustrating and unpleasant. You may wonder how it is related to the topic of improving academic writing skills. In fact, what I am talking next all comes from my experience there. I highly recommend international students do lots of reading in English and develop a habit of reading in English. The more you read, the faster your reading speed is. Why do I emphasize reading here? For me, it is this intensive training in reading that helps me quickly improve my academic writing. I build a really strong foundation through the intensive readings. Regarding writing, learning how others write and imitating their writing style, at least at an early stage, is really important for me. Reading can also help you form your own ideas. This is also my learning process. Except for intensive reading, picking journals is also as important as reading. For me, most of my readings come from the top journals in the field of criminology and sociology. So, my advice is choosing the articles in the top journals of your field.
Once you absorb significant knowledge, have your own ideas, the next step is to start writing. I heard many people say that they have many different ideas, which are all great ideas, but they never really write them down. The truth is these ideas will never become your own if it just exists in your mind. Setting up a daily routine or weekly, monthly routine is helpful too. I also get many advices on academic writing from others, and many suggest me to have a daily writing habit. It does not need to be super long or well-written and well-organized. Just quickly write it down when ideas pop up in your head. It is a great suggestion, but actually it is not easy to accomplish. Instead, the most productive time for me is taking classes and writing paper, then getting it published. My first publication came from my course final paper in my first semester of my first-year master program and it is a solo-authored paper published in a really good journal (This paper gets published three months later after I finished my master program and I have two publications and two articles under review now). The process is long – about two years until it finally gets published. This also leads to my next point, which is that we need to be patient about our academic writing. Rome was not built in a day. The improvement of writing skilled also cannot achieve in short terms. Keep in mind, it is a marathon.
Some other tips in improving writing skill that I think is useful include working closely with a faculty member, either your mentor or your advisor. My mentor in my master program helps me a lot about my academic writing. I cannot imagine how can I publish my own paper in English in decent journal without his help and guidance? We write papers together and I am always the leading author, sometimes I need to revise the paper for fifty, sixty times. You may think it is crazy. But it is true. That is how I improve my academic writing, revising, revising, again and again. Also, most universities have writing center, graduate students really should take advantage of this resource. Establishing a writing group with some of your colleagues is also a good way to learn from each other and make improvements.
Practice makes perfect. But I would say practice makes better! Never hesitate to start writing.