There are a great many forms of academic writing – too many to list – but most of them fall under one of three general categories: a single-source paper, a multi-source paper, and a research paper.

Note that none of the categories listed below is something like “take a position,” “choose a side,” or “advocate a policy” because those are things that can be done in any of the below kinds of essays. Those are kind of arguments rather than kind of essays. Thus, any of the kinds of essays listed below could be analytical/philosophical on the one hand (concerned with explanation) or ethical/political on the other (concerned with advocacy). The below typology of academic writing is organized not by purpose but by the fields of evidence that come into play.

The Single Source Paper: An analysis of a single text (or idea, event, object, etc.) that identifies and discusses some interesting or problematic aspect of that text (or idea, event, object, etc.).

• The Close Reading: An interpretation that shows how a text was made and/or how it works.
• An interpretation of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
• An interpretation of the advisability of the United States entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

• The Theoretical Statement: The presentation of an abstract statement through the discussion of a particular example.
• A theory of “the self” based on Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech in Hamlet.
• A theory of the social causes of crime based on a case study of East Garfield Park in Chicago, IL. 

• The Archival Essay: The presentation of new historical material not widely available.
• A discussion of an eighteenth-century reader’s marginal annotations on the “To thine own self be true” passage in a book archived in the Folger Shakespeare Library.
• A presentation of skin diseases as drawn in ninetieth-century medical textbooks housed in the Yale Library.

• The Empirical Report: The presentation of new data gathered through controlled observation.
• A discussion of the frequency of the word “self” in each of Shakespeare’s works.
• A report on how often medical personnel at the hospital in Salina, KS washed their hands during an observation period.

• The Book Review: A summary and discussion of someone else's book.
• A review of Stephen Greenblatt’s book Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980).
• A review of Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (2014).

The Multi-Source Paper: An essay that brings two or more texts (or events, ideas, objects, etc.) into conversation on the basis of some common ground.

• The Historicist Essay: A consideration of a text in light of historical circumstances relevant to the way it came into existence.
• A discussion of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech in the context of the adages in William Lily’s Latin grammar textbook, Rudimenta Grammatices, which Shakespeare would have studied as a student.
• An argument that the Republican party has mobilized conservative social issues to get Kansas farmers to vote for conservative fiscal policies that aren’t in their own best interests. 

• The Comparative Essay: A consideration of similar texts, ideas, events that come from different contexts.
• A discussion of the treatment of the self in the sixteenth-century English playwright William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the nineteenth-century German philosopher’s G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.
• An illustration of how Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s different views of “nature” led them to support different forms of government.

• The Lens Essay: The use of one text or idea (usually philosophical or theoretical in nature) to unpack and explain a particular example or set of data.
• A reading of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech from the perspective of the American sociologist Erving Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
• An argument using Darwinian theories of evolutionary biology to explain dating in American high schools.

• The Test-a-Theory Essay: The use of an example or data set to evaluate (and potentially improve or disprove) a general philosophical or theoretical idea.
• A consideration of whose theory of tragedy – Aristotle’s, Hegel’s, or Miller’s – best explains Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
• An essay asking if the ISIS attacks in Paris in November 2015 support Martha Crenshaw’s “rational choice theory” of terrorism.

• The Presentist Essay: The use of a historical text or idea to unpack and discuss a recent text or idea.
• A reading of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech as a way to discuss the difficulties of parenting in the increasingly global world of the twenty-first century.
• A discussion of the “classical style” of Roman writers like Cicero designed to convince academics to write essays with less bloated language.

• The Meta-Analysis: A collection and synthesis of several studies on a related topic in an effort to draw some more stable or general conclusions.
• A synthesis of seven studies of the self in seven different US populations in an attempt to establish a general theory of the self.
• A consideration of the past twenty years of research on the relationship between poverty and lottery ticket sales.

• The Review Essay: A discussion and critique of several recent studies on a related topic designed to ascertain the state of a field.
• A critique of recent studies of the self in Shakespeare’s drama by John Lee, Bridget Escolme, and Mustapha Fahmi.
• A discussion of the status of race in higher education admissions based on the arguments in recent books by Franklin Tuitt and Julie Park.

The Research Paper: A special kind of any of the above essays that cites, discusses, and advances previous scholarship on a given topic. In other words, an original contribution to an ongoing field of academic inquiry.