FEATURES AND DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS OF GOOD ACADEMIC WRITIGN

Abstract

Recently, academic writing (AW) has received a considerable attention. It is the means by which many scholars, researchers, academics, and students at universities present their works. This paper first defines the term of ‘academic writing’ as it is necessary to understand its concept. In the second part, the work highlights the significant features of AW such as organization, task achievement, cohesion and coherence, and many others. Third, it focuses on language discourse functions, which are used to express particular ideas such as description, definition, narration and so on. These two parts, the features of AW and language discourse functions, will show how these ideas add great value to the text and make it easier for the readers to understand and follow the piece of writing on academic context. Then, the work moves to discuss the most prominent challenges that might arise from such features and language discourse functions for Non-Native Speakers (NNS) of English. The challenges could be problems of spelling and punctuation, mis-uses of tenses and the omitting verb ‘to be’, lack of electronic resources, and some others.