Academic writing is built upon three truths that aren't self-evident: Writing is Thinking: While "writing" is traditionally understood as the expression of thought, we'll redefine "writing" as the thought process itself. Writing is not what you do with thought. Writing is thinking. - Writing is a Process: Both the interpretation that forms the basis of an argument and the presentation of that argument in a paper need to be done in a sequence of steps, each phase building off the prior. We Write Best in Conversation with Others: In contrast to the image of the solitary writer sitting alone in their candle-lit study and solving all the world's problems, writing is best done with lots of input from others as ideas are developed, tested, and strengthened. What is Academic Writing? to entertain. It's not the not creative writing like fiction and poetry, where the goal is ‎‫كتابة مع الله‬‎ e journalistic writing that you read in the news, where the goal is to inform. It's not transactional writing, as in an email to your boss, where the goal is to communicate. The purpose of academic writing is to search for truth. That sounds fluffy and philosophical, but it simply means that academic writing is where we go to learn about the world we live in about what is true, how things came to be, and how we know. Academic writing is fundamentally analytical. Even academic writing that argues for the virtue of a certain public policy or individual action only does so because it makes a claim to a clear-sighted understanding of an issue In academic writing, there are no politics and no ethics without analysis. The purpose of any particular piece of academic writing is to tell us something about the world that we don't already know. Originality is the key to success. Asking you to produce academic writing is asking you to shift from being a receptor of knowledge to being a creator of knowledge. That's a big shift, but it's also exciting because it means you'll have an opportunity to teach us something that you know. There are two ways to say something new: (1) tell your readers about the existence of something they don't already know about, or (2) give your readers a new interpretation of something that everyone already knows about. So you could (1) tell your readers about an unknown source for Shakespeare's