Avoiding Common Errors in Scholarly Writing
At the graduate level, students are expected to write academic papers in a scholarly way. The problem is at the beginning of his or her studies, a graduate student is a nascent writer and does not know how to write in a scholarly manner. He or she will face many challenges when writing, that may result in him or her making frequent errors. The errors can be persistent unless the student learns how to recognize and change his or her writing behaviors that will lead to the common mistakes. McDougall, Ornelles, & Rao claims that education graduate students coming from other disciplines may have to unlearn previous writing habits that can lead to roadblocks in the “pathway” to quality scholarly writing. …show more content…
The nascent writer has the wrong idea about effective writing and the scientific writing processes. For example, more is better which consequently, the student writes too much or an extremely long sentence that ends up becoming a single sentence paragraph. One in which purpose is to retell an idea, rather than to inform his or her audience or to contribute, or explain an answer to a problem. As a result, writing scholarly papers can start to feel like a daunting task for the nascent …show more content…
As a history major and an A/B Language Arts student, I was shocked at how little I knew about scholarly writing. The biggest problems stemmed from not being able to write in APA format. As a history major, I was not required to write using APA format, but rather in Chicago Turabian style. In K-12, it was mandatory to pre-write, write, and rewrite essay, but never in a scholarly manner. I deduce the kind of constructive feedback I received in my previous class, EDU 7101 is in line with what McDougall and his colleagues are talking about in the study. I will have to unlearn previous writing habits that have been causing roadblocks in my writing to more practical ones that are of quality academic writing which is important because quality academic writing demonstrates a clear focus, my comprehension of my subject and the strength of my