Key Features Of A Good Academic Essay

The academic essay is generally written in a third person point of view with little personalization; this allows the information within the essay to be presented in an unbiased and logical manner. Due to that, academic essays have a formal tone of voice, which is better for expressing concrete ideas and evidence within the body of the work.

The key features of a good academic essay

Academic essays have certain key features or characteristics. These key features define the academic essay as 'a work that retains one central point or theme, all of which support the main argument behind the work.' The academic essay, in other words, is supposed to inform the reader.

There are several key features of academic essays. In order to successfully write an academic essay, students are encouraged to use them as guidelines to produce better work. According to an academic resource, the key features of a good academic essay are:

Complexity. Complexity is a structural trait. It determines how a student uses the words that make up their essay. Complex written language, as a result, uses longer words, phrases and generally appears more dense than less complex works.

Formality and Precision. Formality determines the tone of the essay. The academic essay avoids conversational words and expressions in order to retain its formal tone. Precision in an academic essay refers to the evidence used within the essay (the facts and figures).

Objectivity. Academic essays are objective, meaning that they lack personalization. Since academic essays are written to inform, they lack personalized language (that uses verbs and adverbs) and instead utilize more nouns and adjectives.

Explicitness and Accuracy. Explicitness refers to the way words and phrases related to each other within the text of an essay. Therefore, a student needs to explicitly show the relationship between groups of ideas or text within the body of their work. Accuracy refers to the usage of words within an essay; within an academic essay, the words used there must retain their true meaning (as intended within the work) rather than an alternative meaning.

Hedging and Responsibility. Within an academic essay, a student writer must hedge or make clear the strengths of the claims they detail within their essay. In the essay itself, it's important for the writer to state their intention for arguing their point. Responsibility also relates to hedging, since writers need to be responsible for representing their argument (including evidence and other justifications) within their essay.