What Should You Know About Writing Conventions?

Students come across writing conventions for the first time at college or university when their professor gives them an assignment. Well-educated people must be aware of the above-named rules because they can help to write a brilliant academic paper of any kind. Relevant use of writing code can make any text look coherent and crystal clear. The data that you will study in this article applies to all kinds of scholarly works. 

Main Writing Conventions

They were invented to enlighten the minds of learners so that they could create papers at the university level. If you are willing to enter one of the best universities in the world, you must possess an advanced level of grammar, have a rich academic vocabulary, and read a lot of material constantly to maintain a high degree. 

Writing conventions include:

Punctuation

Punctuation is a set of marks and the use of spacing in a text to make it logical. It consists of a full stop, comma, ellipsis, square brackets, parentheses, exclamation and question marks, apostrophe, slash, colon, etc. While it is easy to express an opinion through speaking, because this skill is given from childhood, punctuation is acquired through many exercises and attempts. Pupils at secondary school study general punctuation rules, but it is not enough for a college or university. Such papers as dissertations, theses, and case studies require a more advanced and deep mastery of punctuation rules. For example, apply a colon at the end of a sentence to introduce a listing. Ex: If you are the best make-up artist, you ought to have the following things: mascara, concealer, bronzer, lip gloss, and etc. 

Spelling

Spelling is the right order of letters in any term that allows the author to convey the main idea of the text to readers. If you make mistakes in words, it may cost you career and greatest job opportunities. Some people neglect the role of orthography, and it spoils the first opinion about a person when writing CVs or covers letters. People do not trust those who are illiterate, and the key to this issue is reading a lot of various books and useful pamphlets, observations, classics, summaries. For example, it is correct to write:

‘receive’ instead of ‘recive’;

‘believe’ opposed to incorrect ‘beleive’;

‘ceiling’ contrary to ‘ceeling’;

‘neighbor’ instead of ‘neibor.’

Capitalization

Capitalization explains when the sentence starts, where the title and proper nouns are. It highlights the importance of some abbreviations and terms. According to the guidelines, a new sentence ought to start with a capital letter and the first word after a full stop. Learners ought to capitalize brand names (Givenchy, Ford, KKW, Prada, Supreme, Nike), companies (Amazon, Deloitte, Spotify, Tesla, Morgan Stanley, Apple, Adidas), planets (Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Pluto, Saturn), nationalities (American, Swiss, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Egyptian, French). There is a huge list of rules of capitalization, and a professional writer has to be informed. 

Grammar

Grammar is a structure of any language and is comprised of syntax and morphology. It makes sentences cogent, consistent, and worthwhile. English grammar is strict and exact, and it is obligatory to keep up with the tense usage. You need to choose the right tenses in sentences to send the correct and necessary signal to the audience. A good author knows where to put gerund, infinitive, -ed or –ing endings, and so on. If you feel unsure about your knowledge of grammar, read books on English grammar and do some practical exercises from them. Grammar has to be mastered by hard work daily. 

Academic Writing Conventions

Scholastic writings are comprised of case studies, dissertations, response and research papers, critical analyses. All of them have to be written carefully, and have to contain objective evidence, complex terms, be crystal clear to comprehend, present a new and unique idea. Some valuable qualities and formalities of good academic writing are:

Complexity

Academic works must be written in a formal style because it demonstrates an advanced level of language possession, and it is feasible to reach by inserting formal vocabulary. For example:

‘Device’ (instead of ‘to create’)

‘distract’ (instead of ‘to amuse’)

‘Authentic’ (instead of ‘true’)

‘calculate’ (instead of ‘count’)

‘validate’ (instead of ‘okay’) etc.

Authors or undergraduates who desire to have a sophisticated research paper ought to utilize formal, complex, university vocabulary. It is not the case when you converse with close friends in daily life. Words and sentences ought to be appropriate. The fundamental goal is to transmit the idea with the help of uneasy expressions to sound as an intellectual person. Writers have to avoid abbreviated forms (don`t, haven`t, didn`t ), phrasal verbs (come up, run out of), colloquial phrases (kind of, like this, a lot of). Reading intellectual works can help to boost and maintain the level. 

Clarity 

Author`s text in papers must put down in a way so that readers comprehended it effortlessly without looking for each word up in a dictionary. If the essay contains mostly complicated terms, the audience will set it aside and forget. Except including refined terminology into the paper, think first how to distribute it in regular intervals, because even professors may criticize a work that is difficult to read and interpret due to uncertainty. Ambiguity means that a word has more than one definition, and readers will perceive it in their way, but an author has to put down a paper precisely not to leave room for interpretation. If your audience comprehends all advanced and complicated vocabulary and gets the principal point of the study, congratulate yourself, because, in the future, you will receive more interested readers. The target to keep in mind for all writers is to harmonize the logic of the essay and usage of scholarly terms. This is the key to success. 

Objectivity

When it comes to creating an academic paper, authors must avoid the prejudice that is expressed by giving their viewpoints. A good writer evaluates a discipline using proofs and evidence without giving one`s own opinion mixed with bias. Thus, if one inserts personal pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘my’, it worsens the quality of the paper, because it must be substituted by ‘the author’. There is a list of subjective and emotive phrases to omit when composing an essay:

‘I really consider’;

‘In my opinion’;

‘I would say’;

‘It`s so terrible’;

‘Awful’;

‘The most disgusting’.

The before mentioned subjective collocations used deliberately or unintentionally will demonstrate the writer`s ignorance of the main rules of academic writing code and will reveal favoritism. To sum up, any academic work ought to have a formal style, objective opinion, and strong proof.

Use of references

Before composing an academic paper, scholars have to read up on a significant amount of professional material. During the process of writing, they have to insert in-text citations that must be in the main body of the paper and reference list that usually stands at the end of any paper. Authors use references to show that their research is not based on their facts and viewpoints, because it is impossible to do without it and considered absolute plagiarism. All research papers supposed to have reference lists and in-text citations. Their function is to support the writer`s conclusions. Students cannot write a paper in other words and omit references. It automatically casts doubt on their work.  

There are various referencing styles like APA (American Psychological Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), AMA (American Medical Association), CSE (Council of Science Editors). Authors scrutinize the major rules of one of the before mentioned styles that their professor has assigned and put it down according to directives.

Writing Conventions Tips

Text and genre matter because they both identify the language rules. Readers perceive messaging with friends and formal texts differently. For instance, contractions and acronyms are prohibited in formal writing the same as the usage of scientific terms in emailing or messaging on Instagram with peers will sound weird. Besides, the blend of rules utilized in essays varies from speech devising.

Keep up with these prime rules on Standard English rules for university papers:

• Avoid easy and short sentences, but put down complex ones.
• Omit run-on sentences and fragments
• Include the entire name of the individual first time you indicate it.
• Abbreviations and acronyms are forbidden.
• Use asterisk marks appropriately.
• Position citations and references properly.
• Use the active voice.

Conclusion

Having read this article, you know all ins and outs of conventions in writing, why it is obligatory to use them, how to include them in theses. Students normally have check-lists with crucial requirements when they compose essays. It facilitates the assignments, and scholars cannot have problems with the structure. Still, it doesn`t mean that papers will have good quality, and students have to make progress continually. Writing a thesis in consonance with punctuation, grammar, capitalization, and spelling guidelines may be hard work for scholars who face them for the first time. If you are puzzled whether your writing is correct, try to read samples of essays on related topics, and you will manage to create your own work.