Written Like a True Scholar

Academic writing is like listening to a smart British person talk. It's fancy and sophisticated. They use words that you would not use in everyday conversation. But, it's fun to listen to because of the unique diction and sophisticated appeal that comes with it.

Being a college student, I have encountered academic writing for class and this exposure helped me see that there is so much time and research spent into things that you would not expect. That idea in it of itself shows that there are so many different interests people take on, and that the level of detail people can reach with these things is pretty amazing. In the anthropology class that I took last semester, we came across many different topics relating to the study of primate behavior. Some of the academic writing I had to look into regarded the activity budget of monkeys, which literally involved scientists watching what a monkey did all day. Of course, this is something that you would have to do if your field of study was primates but the level of detail and data that went into this was quite fascinating. Activity budgets were depicted in graphs determining how often a primate would perform a certain activity. Variables of the primates were looked into as well such as the level of influence age would have on whether or not the primate would engage in a low or high level activity. 

The thing about academic writing that fascinates me the most is the amount of time and research that is put into such a specific field of research such as studying monkey activities. Anthropologists that study primates spend years in their field of study and some actually emerge into the habitat along side the primates to observe them in detail. The level of passion required to write these academic papers is pretty fascinating. 

When I write academic papers, I really try to emphasize the academic and discipline-specific vocabulary that I think would match scholarly writing. That was my most useful tool in trying to imitate academic writing. For example, in my anthropology class one of the tasks was to write my own academic paper regarding the activity budget of the Allen's Swamp Monkey. As opposed to saying something like, "the adult monkey was lazy and pretty much did nothing all day", I would take it up a notch and say, "The adult monkey overall engaged in more stationary activities that demanded very minimal energy such as resting, self-grooming, and allogrooming".

This strategy in my opinion is one of the most persuasive strategies to declare to the reader that you have a command in that field of research. This is probably because if you use big words, that's gonna make you sound smart. Or alternatively, if you boost your diction to a more sophisticated level, then you will consequently appear more intelligent (which one of those sentences made me sound smarter? exactly).