Academic writing is generally seen as writing by academic researchers for journals, symposium volumes and other scholarly publications. The term is also used to refer to writing by tertiary students. We shall draw a distinction between expert writing (academic researchers’ writing) and student writing. We will also distinguish between general and discipline specific writing.

Although both expert writing and student writing are usually referred to as academic writing, the two are essentially different in their. The expert writer normally addresses academic peers and more specifically peers who share the same area of research. S/he attempts to convince the reader, persuading him/her to follow particular arguments. Student writing, on the other hand, is not directed at the writer's peers but at experts in the field about which the writer must display a sufficient amount of knowledge to pass course requirements.

Another major difference between expert and student academic writing is the level of content. The expert is presenting new research in the context of previous research. The student, however, especially at undergraduate level, must come to terms with degrees of knowledge of the discipline and demonstrate this learning process in his/her writing. One important part of this process involves judgements about the reader's background knowledge. At the postgraduate level, the writer has to present a judicious balance between display and transmission.

Student writing is response writing (Hamp-Lyons, 1991), especially at undergraduate level. Students write in response to a set task which is part of their course assessment. The student writer is usually provided with a set topic and prompts which set out the requirements of the writing exercise. Particular constraints regarding macrostructure and format may be explicitly stated in the instructions. By comparison, the expert writer is generally self-motivated and is constrained only by the traditions of his/her discipline. S/he has the choice of responding to one or another scholar’s arguments.

While some student writing genres are often seen as at least similar if not identical with expert writers' genres, the two sets of genres are essentially different. Thus assignment, exam paper, thesis, dissertation, lab. report are exclusively student genres while chapter, research article, and book review are expert writers’ genres. In spite of such differences, expert writing usually functions as the main model available for student writers, either explicitly promoted in academic support programs or implicitly through their obligatory or recommended readings. It will be argued later that there is a need to develop more appropriate models in tertiary writing programs.

The English academic tradition has involved particular ways of talking and writing about knowledge and the discourses of universities have typically required the detachment of this knowledge. This is achieved by using various linguistic devices to detach the author from the text and the subject matter (Chafe 1985). These devices set apart the writer’s own experiences from the subject matter of their writing and enable the writer to appear ‘objective’.

Detachment involves passive constructions, nominalisations and abstract or inanimate subjects. Passive constructions serve to factor out notions of direct agency in writing and occur frequently in academic texts. Nominalisation, as Halliday (1989) pointed out is a process by which an originally verb-like concept is expressed, through 'grammatical metaphor' as an abstract noun or nominal group. The notion of agency which is frequently attached to the role of subject is modified by the use of abstract subjects (e.g. inanimate and abstracts nouns) as agents. Within the process of detachment expert writers still usually manage to let the reader hear ‘the writer's voice'.

Academic texts are organised at the global level in accordance with a set of accepted macrostructural components, such as introduction, discussion, etc. While there are differences across the disciplines as regards obligatory components, the need for clear macrostructural organisation is a general requirement. Abstracts, bibliographies, acknowledgements, appendices are also general features.

Readers of academic texts expect information to be clustered in certain ordered ways. The development of ideas, in English academic writing traditions at least, tends to be linear and arranged into ‘clusters’ which represent content areas. For example, the ‘locality’ of a particular species’ habitat or a test site is a concept described in a cluster rather than in a sentence here and a sentence there. (Kaldor, Herriman & Rochecouste 1998). Many academic researchers prefer information presented in a linear sequence where more general information precedes more detailed/specific information. There is also a tendency for other patterns of text organisation at the global level (e.g. the arrangement of causes and effects and pros and cons, or the chronological arrangement of the experimental or data collection process, etc.).

Every sentence in expert writing has to fulfil an appropriate rhetorical function, i.e. it is in place for a particular communicative purpose. It may EXEMPLIFY a more general statement made earlier, or it may DEFINE a term. There is no place for sentences that do not contribute to the rhetorical structure or global message of the text. A rhetorical function can be cataphoric and point forwards such as INTRODUCE, or it may be anaphoric and point backwards to one, or several, earlier sentences, e.g. it may COUNTER, JUSTIFY, EXEMPLIFY, EXPAND, QUALIFY the information contained in any of the earlier sentences.

Expert writers use a large proportion of terms expressing abstract concepts which mostly come from Greco-Latin sources and which are less frequent in non-academic contexts. Many such terms belong to what may be regarded as 'academic core' vocabulary, that is they may be used in all or most disciplines in the same sense, while others may be exclusively used by some disciplines and not at all used in others or used in others in quite different senses. For example, assumption, suggestion, claim, implication, prediction, epitome, anecdotal, hypothesis, etc, can be seen as belonging to the 'academic core vocabulary', while structuralism, kynesthesis, chaos theory, phoneme etc. belong to discipline specific academic vocabularies.

There are also a large number of collocations or idiomatic phrases and expressions to be found in expert writing. The more fixed a collocation is the more idiomatic it becomes and is part of our native speakers phraeseology. (Crystal 1998:105). Native speakers in general have high levels of ‘phraseological competence’ and it is fair to assume that this is one of the major difficulties that non native speakers of English have when speaking and writing.

Cohesiveness and coherence features are, of course, also essential characteristics of expert writing. Taking these terms in their simplest interpretation from the point of view of academic writing, cohesion (see Halliday & Hasan 1976) refers to features that bind the text together with cohesive ties so that the reader can follow coreferentiality throughout the text and clearly comprehend the rhetorical and logical relationships between sentences, clauses or phrases, provided the writer has used appropriate signals to indicate such relationships. Coherence only partially depends on such ties as it also relies on the arrangement of information throughout the text. According to O’Brien (199 :462) ‘an academic text cannot be globally coherent of it is not possible to discern, with an appropriate amount of attention, the message or messages it carries: this translates as the absence of a thesis of argument’.

When one is writing across cultures differences in what is perceived as coherent varies, so does the issue as to who is responsible establishing this textual understanding. In some cultures is it not the responsibility of the writer to make himself/herself understood but it is the responsibility of the reader to understand what has been written no matter how unclear it is. In English it is the responsibility of the writer to be understood, to make sure that the reader can understand what is being said.

The distribution of information within a text can make a significant difference to ease of reading (Horning 1993), in particular in relation to what Clark and Haviland (1977) called the ‘Given-New Contract’: as readers we have particular ways in which we expect (a) information that is already known to us and (b) information that is new to us to be presented in a text. Sodowsky & Witte (1983), for instance, have shown that when essays contain too many sentences beginning with ‘new’ rather than ‘given’ information, readers take longer to establish the semantic context necessary to make the high load of new information in such sentences understandable (see Vande Kopple 1986:94). Ease of reading, however, is not always an overriding concern for expert writers and there may be a great deal of individual and cross-cultural variation in how highly the feature of ease of reading through given and new information distribution may be valued.

As the name suggests, this aspect of academic writing is about providing evidence for what you say. Support for you ideas can be generated from data, from examples and from other researchers. In this case it is included into the text as a quote or citation and in the western academic tradition it is extremely important to acknowledge the sources of other people’s ideas. We do this for a number of reasons: it is essential for academic ethics; it allows your readers to pursue a part of your work which interests them; you will eventually need to go back and check something, so adequate referencing the first time round saves you time in the long run.

Discipline specific features are those which are required by each particular discipline of study.

The use of visual components in the text and their integration into the text are discipline specific writing skills. These might be tables and histograms in science subjects, examples of speech in linguistics, flow charts in computer studies, etc. The reader must be given to understand exactly what the visual components are illustrating or what aspects of the visual components the written passages are introducing or explaining. Just how visual representations fit into the written component of a text varies across disciplines.

The visual impact of diagrams and their potential for conveying meaning cannot be overlooked. We just have to look at how many models are used to explain abstract theories to see the important semantic role that they play.

The learning of some vocabulary is very much part of learning the discipline itself whereas other vocabulary may contribute to the knowledge of writing in any discipline. Each discipline adds its own specialist terms to the academic core. Examples of such vocabulary include terminology for species ( e.g. Nodilittorina nodosa) in Zoology, diseases ( e.g. Schistosomiasis) in medicine and epidemiology, tests and instruments from science, engineering, mathematics and statistics ( e.g. Shannon-Weiner indices, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium tests), terms and acronyms used in computer sciences ( e.g. UPS – uninterruptable power supply, HTML – Hypertext markup language), terms in taxation law, accounting, finance and commerce ( e.g. identifiable intangible assets), and terms for whole schools of thought ( e.g. Structuralism in Linguistics and Anthropology). Discipline specific vocabulary includes processes which are not always shared across disciplines, e.g. dissection, enucleation, electrophoresis in science and medicine, and redeeming in accounting. There are also discipline specific collocations and phrases not encountered in other fields of study, e.g. asset recognition in accounting, allele frequencies in zoology, and participant observation in the social sciences.

Part of the content knowledge of different disciplines involves a knowledge of underlying taxonomies unique to the discipline (Halliday 1989). Scientific taxonomies are familiar to those working in the specific areas and not necessarily familiar to those outside. In Botany there are taxonomies of plant species and in Zoology taxonomies of animal species. In Medicine there are taxonomies of disease types such as respiratory diseases, cardio-vascular diseases and infectious diseases. In Linguistics there are taxonomies of language families which provide categories such as Indo-European, Austronesian and Pama-Nyungan. Taxonomies may appear in texts explicitly or ‘hidden’ when the writer assumes that the reader does not require explicit reminders. Expert writers often create new taxonomies to describe research findings and develop explanatory models or theories.

Every discipline has its unique range of genres which characterise expert writing within the discipline. There are differences also within the internal characteristics of genres between disciplines. We have already seen that science subjects require laboratory reports while engineering is more likely to require project reports and social science disciplines request essays. Theses and dissertations also form a genre, but one which might vary across disciplines for example experimental research will require the methodology, results and discussion chapters while a social science thesis is more likely to contain case studies.