Throughout the Academic Writing Hub, various language approaches commonly found in Medical Sciences, MPLS, Social Sciences, and Humanities have been highlighted. The following topics provide a useful starting point for understanding the conventional writing style within your subject area:
- Academic Style
- Personal Pronouns, Passive & Impersonal Nouns
- Incorporating Scholarship into Your Writing
- Criticality, Stance and Voice
- Sentence Length
- Academic Vocabulary & Collocations
Exploring Disciplinary Writing in Your Field
Reading and analysing academic texts in your discipline can be challenging and time-consuming, but it is an essential part of becoming an expert writer. Students entering university are expected to become genre analysts. Through subject reading, they learn not only the content of their field but also its characteristic language, writing conventions, and discourse patterns.
As a genre analyst, you should pay close attention to the vocabulary, rhetorical structures, and stylistic conventions used in the texts you read. Identifying and reproducing these disciplinary conventions in your own writing is a key aspect of becoming a successful member of your academic community.
Many students assume that reading published journal articles is sufficient for learning academic writing conventions. While journal articles are an important academic genre—particularly at postgraduate level—it is often more beneficial to examine examples of writing produced by previous students. This is because significant differences exist between published research articles and the types of assignments students typically complete, such as tutorial essays, examinations, dissertations, and theses.
Sources of Student Writing Examples
The following resources can help you access examples of student writing that are comparable to the work you are expected to produce:
- Textual Examples in this Hub
- Departmental & Divisional Libraries
- Tutors, Supervisors & Departmental Administrators
- The Oxford Research Archive (ORA)
How Do I Use ORA?
The Oxford Research Archive (ORA) is one of the most valuable resources for accessing previous Oxford students’ dissertations and theses within your disciplinary area. It can help you understand both the language and stylistic conventions of your academic community, as well as effective approaches to organising your writing.
Visit the Oxford Research Archive here.
ORA allows students to search for examples of dissertations, theses, and other academic work relevant to their field, providing valuable models for both writing style and structural organisation.
