Academic or Scholarly Writing. The Biggest Thing

¶ … academic or scholarly writing. The biggest thing is the professionalism that goes into the work. A good piece of scholarly writing requires that the researcher has developed genuine scholarship in the field. It is the knowledge and quality of the research that determines whether something is scholarly writing or not, not the quality of writing. So basically, you need to start by learning as much as you can about the subject, approaching your research from a number of different angles. That also means using the best sources. Source are important.

Generally, sources are academic in nature themselves. You can make exceptions where data are concerned -- an economist or archaeologist will use primary source data for example, but you must build everything around research and scholarly work that has been peer reviewed. The key to the peer review system is that the author of the work has it reviewed by others who are deemed to be experts in their fields.

As a consequence, the work will have passed the test of peer review whereby its contents are agreed upon to be meritorious in the field. This practice should weed out bad research that was conducted in a sloppy manner, or poor interpretations by the authors of the research that they already have. In general, a source for academic research will either by a primary source (the data being analyzed) or it will be peer-reviewed.

Peer reviewed sources have gone through the process of peer review specifically to ensure that they are of a high level of quality and that the contribute to the scholarly discourse on the subject. Sources that are not peer reviewed have not been subject to this scrutiny, and therefore are not guaranteed to be of a high standard -- indeed many such sources are nowhere near a high standard.

The ultimate objective of peer review is to ensure that the knowledge about a subject matter is as rigorous and accurate as possible. This is why you only use the data that you gather, and the peer reviewed sources relating to your subject matter, in order to produce scholarly research. Phase 4, Discussion Board 2 There are several sections to Chapter 1. These include the topic overview/background, the research question and the conceptual framework. Most of the sections in Chapter 1 are fairly straightforward.

By the time that you are ready to write the research, you already know the research question, and can provide a basic overview of the topic. So you are just writing out things that are more or less factual and that you already know. Maybe the most challenging section will be the conceptual framework, of these three. This section is perhaps a bit more abstract.

The literature review covers this in more detail, but with a subject matter like management one of the biggest issues is that it encompasses so many threads of research. In my case, we have not-for-profit management, organizational change, and a few others that are involved. There's organizational psychology, there's sociology. My research draws bits and pieces from all of these things. So it will be a challenge to explain, in short form, all of the different concepts that are at work in this section.

For this type of research, there are no quick and easy answers. The literature review provides a much better framework for delving into all of the underlying concepts, so I am concerned that this section will be difficult to get right, because of all the different variables at play. Explaining the conceptual framework succinctly will not be easy. Phase 4, Discussion Board 3 Chapter 3 is the methodology section of the paper, and this again has several sections.

These include the data collection, the data analysis, and a bunch of things that do not apply to an action research paper like population and sample. So this section is highly descriptive, and therefore generally easy to write. Conceiving of all of these things in the first place is the hard part -- choosing what methodology you are going.