2.5 Reading Academic Writing
Nancy Ami; Natalie Boldt; Sara Humphreys; Jemma Llewellyn; and Erin Kelly
As undergraduate students (or whoever you may be, but we assume you are an undergraduate student), you will be asked to read different types of academic writing. We’re sure you’re not surprised by this assertion. What might surprise you is that reading academic writing doesn’t have to be a miserable chore, if you know how to approach the task. Academic reading can take a number of different forms, but you will most likely be reading peer-reviewed articles to collect ideas and opinions that support the paper you’re writing. Here’s another tidbit you might not have known: these are called academic sources.
What Am I Looking For When Reading Academic Sources?
Put another way, what are the reader’s expectations? Remember when we discussed academic writing as an umbrella (or MASSIVE) genre in Section 2.3 Academic Writing as a Genre? In this section we will predominantly discuss the structure of primary and secondary sources that you will need to read as an undergraduate student (for more explanation of sources, head to chapter four) and cover the conventions that you will need to be mindful of when reading.
Understanding these conventions will allow you to make better choices when drafting and revising your own academic writing assignments, which are apprentice versions of published academic writing. Yes, that’s right: as an undergraduate student, you are a type of apprentice, learning the ropes. The great thing is that when you learn how to navigate academic writing, you’ll find these techniques (reading critically, arguing a point, etc.) are commonplace in the kind of reading and writing you’ll be doing in your professional life.
Let’s briefly discuss peer-reviewed journals, which contain the peer-reviewed articles you will be reading a lot of in any discipline you major or minor in. Every discipline (music, biology, chemistry) has its own journals in which current research is published. They are regarded as reliable sources of information because the articles are peer reviewed, and most libraries, including those at the University of Victoria, explain what that means.[1]
For many of you, you are approaching peer reviewed articles cold, and by that, we mean you have literally no expectations of a peer-reviewed article, except maybe some anxiety that such an article will be difficult to read. However, once you understand the conventions of peer- reviewed articles, we think you’ll feel better about reading them.
The content of peer-reviewed articles is vast and varied, but the purpose is generally the same. Academic writers often write with the purpose of conveying information to their peers (other academics in the same field) and persuading these readers that this information has value. The specifics of the argument might vary – for example, a chemist might be arguing that her lab team’s experiment suggests a new concept is true while an art histori