5 Effective study: writing for academic study purposes

5.1 Types and styles of writing

In your studies, as in everyday life, you will come across many different types of written information, including newspapers, books, magazines, letters, emails, promotional literature and websites, to name but a few. Each type of writing has a particular style or set of conventions associated with it. Some will have an entertaining style, while others will be written in factual style; some will be formal, while others will be friendly and chatty. This course, for example, is for teaching ideas about management to readers who are not familiar with them. Hence we have been trying to write in an informative, quite formal but hopefully readable and interesting style. We might contrast this with a newspaper article, which is often written for readers who are familiar with the news story it relates to and attempts to put forward a particular point of view about it.

The writing you are required to do in the study of business and management is usually one of two types, an essay or a report. Both are an opportunity to show your ability to use your knowledge to answer a specific question. You will not be asked to write about something in a general sense, but rather you will be asked to focus on a particular topic. You can see this in each of the activities that you have worked on throughout this course.

The styles you are asked to adopt for essays and reports have some similarities. For example, any writing for academic purposes usually sets out to inform the reader in an objective, even-handed way rather than to entertain or express an opinion. It also tends to deal with more complex ideas and facts than writing for other purposes. The following are four accepted conventions which should be followed when writing for academic purposes:

Formality In academic writing, we try to avoid the use of ‘I’ as this can appear subjective and biased. This is called making use of the passive voice, e.g. ‘It may be thought that …’, rather than the active voice, e.g. ‘I think …’.

Balanced views We often need to show that we can see beyond one person's opinion, including our own, of an issue and that we are trying to come to a balanced conclusion. There is not much room for personal or emotional detail but this can be included where we feel that our personal experience adds to the writing. What the reader wants to see is your ability to understand the material, to present evidence to support your argument and to come to an informed answer to the question or task you were set.

Some analysis Academic writing requires students to think carefully about the ideas they have studied and how they might help to answer the question asked or do the task required. This means that the piece of work needs to do more than just describe parts of the material you have studied; you have to break down the question or task into smaller parts. You practised this in Activities 1 and 2, when you were asked to analyse a simple job or task using the transformation model.

Referencing Although academic writing can include summaries, in your own words, of the materials you have studied, you should not use or quote ideas and phrases without acknowledging where you read them and who originally wrote them.