Challenges of Scholarly Writing

Writing is a means of expressing oneself through words and even a method of sharing information about different fields of study. Many have enjoyed and appreciated various forms literature that have transformed readers to another place or make them feel that they are someone else. The benefits of writing are endless. More so, it has become an integral part of a person's life and an inevitable component of the society. For without it, the world today would be bland and monotonous. Since we were toddlers we were trained to read and write so that in our adult years, we will be equipped with a tool that can advance our status in the society which can either be for personal or professional purposes. For me, writing has been an arduous but rewarding part of my life. At first, I was a little apprehensive about writing because it requires the writer to know a lot about sentence constructions, proper usage of punctuations and others. It seemed that writing was a tedious task that demanded time and effort in order to produce high-quality outputs. But after numerous writing exercises and trials, I was able to get used to with the rules and guidelines involved in writing. Because of this, I was able to be exposed to various forms of writing such as creative, technical and scholarly writing. Among the three, creative writing is the easiest and most enjoyable because it gives freedom to the writer to write about anything under the sun. It is like typing on the keyboard or scribbling on a piece paper everything that pops in your head. Meanwhile, technical writing demands technical knowledge about a certain subject which makes it harder than creative and scholarly writing. However, scholarly writing is a different story because it is arduous to write but the end results are beneficial and helpful particularly to the academe. During my days as a student, I was bombarded with a lot of scholarly papers which helped us to learn more about the courses that we took in college. There were days that ideas just came flowing in your mind that helped me finished my research or writing papers in a short amount of time. But there are also moments when you can not seem to extract any good thoughts from your brain even if you spend hours and hours researching, reading and brainstorming. This type of incident is famously known as writer’s block wherein the writer experiences a short-term inability to start or continue the writing process which is frequently caused by the lack of drive and creativity. Also, another writing obstacle is the generation of ideas or thoughts. The most difficult part of writing is the beginning and the conclusion phase. As a writer, I found it hard to organize and develop properly my views and perceptions about a certain subject matter. Even though there is a lot of information, sometimes it is difficult to synthesize all of them to make coherent and logical paragraphs. Aside from this, writers particularly students also go through many obstacles in scholarly writing such as poor structure of writing composition, incorrect usage of grammar and words, citations and plagiarism. When these factors remained unnoticed, the likelihood of generating a solid writing material would be impossible. The key to producing a well-structured scholarly paper is that the thesis statement must be direct and concise. Also, it should be supported by strong arguments at the body of the paper and followed by a conclusion that summarizes the main points and answers the thesis statement. More so, grammar and language used should be appropriate to the topic to make the paper credible and smooth-flowing. However, the most important factor to consider in writing is using proper citations to avoid plagiarism. In writing, it is inevitable to borrow ideas from other writers or previous studies. In order to avoid committing a professional misconduct, writers should cite all sources that they have used in their scholarly papers as a sign of acknowledgment that the incorporated information were taken from other publications. As an alternative, it would be better if writers tried to create their own ideas instead of copying other people’s work thus their skills in writing and critical thinking would be further developed. There is no shortcut in making excellent scholarly papers. Writers must learn the basics of writing before they can be able to yield productive outputs. Moreover, there is no alternate for sitting down and jotting down your ideas on paper so writers should make the best out of writing and try to be honest and responsible .