Writing for your Subject: How to Tailor your Essays for your Academic Area

Students have multiple academic writing strategies available. We tend to see academic writing as one big category, even if it has subcategories and sub-disciplines, depending on which class you are attending. 

Of course, the cliches regarding academic writing is that you have to go into robot mode. So, do not use humor or puns or write about personal experiences, and it is best to stay clear when talking in the first person. That can be true for some fields, but let’s not forget that academia is vast, and the language you will use for a philosophy paper will differ from how you approach a physics essay. 

So, before we can begin to pass around discipline-specific writing tips, it is best to understand some of the various “areas” of science that school subjects can cover.

The types of sciences

STEM

In the first category, we have the hard sciences of the STEM fields. STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.” 

These are the no-nonsense fields of study, where every word has to be precise and weighed. You can afford to exaggerate in a report about a novel, or you can misquote a philosopher, but you can’t do that when writing in STEM. 

If, for some reason, the theory is wrong or the calculations do not add up, planes stop flying, trains stop running, and wall sockets start bursting into flame. 

In general, hard sciences try their best to report on the outside world. Some see these types of facts as the truest of all because they are independent of human opinion and will. After all, gravity does not care if you believe in it or not. It is there. 

All of these characteristics translate well into a precise writing style. X particle does Y action under the Z field. There is no room here for flowery language and interpretation. 

Of course, if you are presenting a theory, then things can slightly change. 

In a regular situation, people try to persuade each other via rhetoric. In most cases, the guy with the sharpest tongue wins. Yet, rhetoric does not apply evenly when writing across disciplines. 

In the hard sciences, you are supposed to write an essay that lays out your cases. The facts do the talking, not the emotional appeals. Essay structures are another topic, but what we need to take away from this is that the tone of academic writing for STEM should never deviate. If you need help in essay structures you can search for the best essay writing service within your budget, so that at least you will have a starting point. 

Regardless, ”robot mode” should always be on. 

Soft sciences 

Reading a physics paper is almost impossible for most people off the street. The same goes for attempting to navigate a math paper. Even though it is math, you can barely find a number on the page. It’s all theorems and letters. 

Both literally and figuratively, the hard sciences are hard. 

But the soft sciences are different, as they seem to occupy a middle ground between the STEM fields and the humanities. 

It would be a grave mistake to assume that soft sciences are not as “hard” and intellectually demanding as STEM, but the methodology does not apply equally. 

In many ways, things like particles and forces, metals, machines and rivers are much easier to predict and measure than human beings. If one were to construct history, measuring rocks is much easier than trying to interpret thoughts, which  can be based on incomplete evidence, or predict something as volatile as human behavior. 

The soft sciences attempt to apply the scientific method wherever they can, but they still take the liberty to give opinions, make assumptions, and interpret data through a specific lens. If you did any of these things in STEM, your paper would be ignored.  

Fields like linguistics, journalism, psychology, and philosophy are well represented here. Often, the ball is pushed further, and progress is made not through using machines and measurements but through appeals to reason, rhetoric, and data studies. 

There is much more room for the author to insert himself here as he attempts to write for different academic fields. 

As a result of all that was mentioned, the language needs to stay at a sweet spot between STEM and artistic writing. You have to be able to spout the jargon of your field but also to write a paper that anyone can understand. 

Your most powerful tool will be hedging. Unless you are absolutely sure, you can always qualify your statements. If you look at how lawyers’ journalists write and speak, they always qualify their statements with “allegedly”, “arguably”, and “it seems that”. 

Humanities 

If you look at a brain scan, our neocortex is a very narrow-thin layer on top of the brain, comparable to the skin on an apple. We are much less rational than we like to think, and even when we successfully manage to be rational, it is for the purpose of obtaining what our “lizard brain” wants. 

We will never be able to measure and quantify precisely why music or art moves us so much. This is why bands can’t make five good albums in a row, or Hollywood alternates between flops and hits. There is still a lot of magic surrounding the arts, music, and literature, and we have yet to find a formula that lets us tap into transcendence at a whim. 

There is science here, too, especially in music, but it is very limited compared to STEM or even the soft sciences. The humanities represent the end goal of human knowledge, the things that feed the soul. 

If you are customizing essays for different academic fields, the language used for the humanities is by far the most personal and subjective. Here, you can actually use “I” and “myself”. 

But do not make the mistake of thinking that there are no objective standards for beauty, music, or writing. You have to appeal to the rules of your field (musical theory, painting technique, etc) while also inserting yourself and your opinion unapologetically. 

The language can be as flowery as you wish, as long as you aren’t making word salads. You can use metaphors, analogies, comparisons, and anything that comes to mind. 

So, what are you waiting for? 

Let’s recap. 

The humanities allow for self-expression and more personal language, while the hard sciences require precision, argumentation, and strict objectivity. 

Occupying a space between the two are the soft sciences, which require both scientific research and personal speculation, analysis, and inference. 

Once you know what academic field you are writing for, everything tends to fall into place.