As I settle into the mid-semester break, knowing it will soon pass through my fingers and I’ll be back on campus, I figure now would be a good time to talk about academic writing. What makes it so different to non-fiction writing? Aren’t both working with facts and teaching the reader something? What about creative writing? If you had a Venn diagram with academic writing and creative writing in the two circles, would they overlap? What about a non-fiction circle?

All writing, in some way, is made to educate and inform. Non-fiction books are educational reads that can span a range of topics and genres – textbooks, picture books, fashion collections, and so on. These texts are educational and may spark your imagination or interest. Creative writing does a similar thing; it is made to convince the reader of a truth, be it the author’s truth in a memoir or semi-biographical adult fiction, or the truth of a fantasy world – the world-building and characters need to be believable to reach a sense of immersion and escapism in a novel. These are two different types of creative writing, but you can see how they each require a truth to be learnt by the reader. This is one of many ways to describe non-fiction and creative writing, but what about academic writing?

Would you believe me if I told you that academic writing employs techniques I see in creative writing as much as it does from non-fiction? Academic writing is made to inform the reader of something while also convincing the reader of the necessity for that thing. For example, PhD research needs to identify a gap in the literature in the field and convince enough people that your work will fill that gap in some capacity. Someone could look at a phenomenon, the impact of TikTok on teens and their career prospects, for example, and after going through the work that has already been published in the field globally – theses, dissertations, PhDs, articles, conference papers, books, government stats, etc. – they may funnel down to their specific area of interest, their home country that doesn’t have a lot of data or studies reflecting the phenomenon, if any.

It is more than just a blend of informative and persuasive writing that goes into academic work. One key part of academic writing that shines a creative light on the research is the researcher’s ontology and epistemology. Ontology is the nature of being, and the nature of reality, while epistemology is the nature of knowledge. These two things make up the basis of a researcher’s positionality, which is essentially how they see the world and their lens when it comes to research. This perspective differs depending on your view of ontology and epistemology, and there are various paradigms and research methodologies a researcher can fit into. It is only in recent years that personal identity has started to come through in research as a result of a shift away from the objective “one truth” way of research back in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now researchers can take a more subjective stance, placing more onus on the equality of voices and experiences instead of on the results pointing to a single answer. Indigenous methodologies have also started to find their footing which has the research not only including communities and giving voice to those in minority groups, but giving back to the community through the research conducted.

This new chance to involve oneself in the research on a more personal level means that there is an element of personal truth involved in the research. Here is where the creative writing aspects come in. In sharing perspectives, experiences can be more easily understood through immersion in someone else’s perspective – much like a fiction story you would escape into. We feel more attached to stories when there is heart, soul and emotion put into them, so why wouldn’t that show in academic writing a researcher is also putting their heart and soul into? Depending on the positionality and the intent of your research, you may choose to evoke specific emotions in your readers to make them feel strongly about something, as we would with the characters we love in our books.

The language sits closer to non-fiction, for obvious reasons, but considering a literature review can be over 50 pages, you need to be able to keep your readers engaged, so you’ll likely be dipping into some creative writing techniques to make sentences flow on from each other and not feel monotonous and blunt. When linking themes and arguments together you want to be sure to thread the points together and create segues, possibly utilising some tension with the counterarguments and “opposition” perspectives as you introduce another side to the situation. I wouldn’t go as far as to turn opposing sides of a topic into an enemies-to-lovers dilemma, but you can see how it can be far more engaging to read than the textbook-style format of deliberation.

This barely scratches the surface of academic writing as there are many more steps I have to go through to better wrap my head around the monumental tasks ahead of me. For the average reader though, I will stop here. Academic writing doesn’t have to go down the dry, densely worded pages route, we’re far past that point in academic writing. Academic writing develops as the nature of research shifts, and with the wider acceptance of subjectivity and inclusive research, I think we will see academic writing become not only easier to read but more engaging and rewarding as a result.