Views of Academicians on Traits of Academic Writing

Academic writing is the process of sharing original research with other scholars in accordance with certain standard rules. This process requires correctly following the steps of scientific academic writing. However, a close analysis of recent academic texts reveals a wide range of mistakes or shortcomings. The purpose of this research is to examine the characteristics of academic writing based on the views of the academicians creating it. A semi-structured interview form was created on Google Docs virtual office for this research using qualitative research methodology. Thus, 30 academicians from different cities and universities of Turkey were involved. Content analysis was used to assess the collected data. Each answer given by the academicians was placed into a category such as similarity and relatedness. These categories were transformed into tables by frequency values of the answers, and each table was supported with quotations extracted from the answers. The results show that the academicians presented the highest number of comments about the characteristics related to sections containing “methodology” and “results, discussions and suggestions.” The participants also reported that in their article reviewing process, they encounter the highest number of errors in the “methodology” section, followed by errors in formal standards, spelling-punctuation / expression and academic style.