Academic writing — learning the shape of an argument

Academic paragraphs do a fixed set of jobs. They summarise prior work, point out a gap in it, place a claim, support it, and head off the objection that is coming. Across fields these moves barely change.

So you do not have to stay inside your own discipline. You do have to pick a paragraph doing the move you want. If the question is how to absorb a citation into your own sentence, take a paragraph that does that well; if it is how to handle an objection, take one that does that.

Load a whole paper and you will most likely reread the introduction a few times and stop. One well-made paragraph beats a whole article: it already contains a claim, its support, and the joins, and it is small enough to finish.

Choose it by where your own drafts stall. If introductions are the problem, take an introduction paragraph; if it is the discussion, take one from a discussion section.

The most common way of imitating academic style is to scatter connectives. Putting however, moreover, or furthermore in front of a sentence does not make an argument. When the order underneath is wrong, a connective on top makes the reader work harder, not less.

Look at the order first: what this sentence takes from the one before, what it hands to the one after. Get that right and half the connectives can go without the paragraph losing anything.

Sentences like "A reported that B", "this is consistent with C", and "this reading, however, presumes D" look nearly the same from paper to paper. These are not worth reinventing each time; a handful of them should be firmly in hand.

In hand means it comes out from the meaning alone. Recognising it on the page is not enough to produce it while drafting. Rewrite the same sentence a few times across several days and your first drafts start moving faster.

Reproducing a source in practice and reproducing it in a manuscript are entirely different acts. Practice exists to get the phrasing into your hands, and what should come out of it is your own sentence doing the same job.

In the manuscript, quotations are marked as quotations and the rest is yours. Not fixating on matching the original word for word during practice keeps that line clear.