LEC052003 Afsana Begum Chowdhury , Mechanics of Academic Writing

MECHANICS OF ACADEMIC WRITING

Academic Writing is the formal writing style used in colleges and universities . It's what students are expected to produce for classes and what professors and academic researchers use to write scholarly materials . In composition,  writing mechanics are the conventions  governing  the technical aspects of writing including spelling, punctuation, capitalization and abbserviations. The goal of the mechanics of writing  is to make the writing precise and grammatically correct. It is directed to make the writing systematic and being correct. 

‌              The important factors in mechanics of writing are - spelling, punctuation, Italics, names of persons and titles of works in the research etc. 

‌        Correct punctuation in writing makes the argument strong. 

Punctuation: ‌The primary purpose of punctuation is to ensure the clarity and readability of your writing. Although there are many required uses, punctuation is, to some extent, a matter of personal preference.

Apostrophes - Apostrophes indicates contradictions and possessives  .  General practice is to form the possessive of monosyllabic proper names ending in a sibilant sound (s, z, sh, zh, ch, j) by adding an apostrophe and another s (Keats’s poems, Marx’s theories) except, by convention, for names in classical literature (Mars’ wrath).

Colons - Colons are used to indicate that what follows will be an example, explanation, or elaboration of what has just been said. They are commonly used to introduce quotations. It is also used before " For example ," "that is, " and namely when there is a considerable break in the flow of sentence. 

Commas - Commas are usually required between items in a series (blood, sweat, and tears), between coordinate adjectives (an absorbing, frightening account), before coordinating conjunctions joining independent clauses, around parenthetical elements, and after fairly long phrases or clauses preceding the main clause of a sentence. 

Dashes- A dash may be an En or Em dash. with has its special utility in writing 

. The former one is used to ranges ,negative numbers and lists. Some writers tend to overuse [em] dashes, substituting them loosely for other marks of punctuation. The [em] dash, however, has only a few legitimate uses: around parenthetical elements that require a number of internal commas, and before a summarizing appositive.

Exclamation marks - Exclamation mark should be used sparingly in scholarly writing. It is used in exclamatory sentences with a correct syntax. 

Hyphens -Hyphens are used to form some types of compound words, particularly compound adjectives that precede the word(s) they modify (a mind-boggling experience, a well-established policy, a first-rate study). Hyphens also join prefixes to capitalized words (post-Renaissance) and link pairs of coequal nouns. 

Period (.) -It is used to end stop sentences  .They also come at the end of notes and after complete blocks of information in bibliographical citations . The period follows a parenthesis that falls at the end of a sentence. It is placed within the parenthesis when the parenthetical element is independent. 

Quotation marks("....")-It is used to designate an important quote in a writing . Single quotation marks are used for emphasis and around single letters. It should be noticed that commas and and periods are placed before quotation marks, semicolons and colons are placed after, and question mark is placed depending upon the position before and after the quotation mark. 

Semicolons- Semicolons are used to separate items in a series when some of the items require internal commas. They are used between independent clauses that are not joined by a coordinating conjunction, and they may be used before the coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence if one of the independent clauses requires a number of internal commas.

Slashes - It is used as a replacement for "or".Also , it is used in fractions which are expressed as numerals. 

Square brackets []-Square brackets are used for an unavoidable parenthesis within a parenthesis , to enclose interpolations in a quotation or in incomplete data , an to enclose phonetic transcription. 

  

          These are the few important factors in mechanics of writing , essential to the  transparency and greatness of the text. The purpose of the punctuation

is to bring clarity and writing and to make it comprehensive. 

References 

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, ed. Joseph Gibaldi and Walter S. Achtert (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1977), pp. 9–41.