Don't make an argument: tell a story that's never been told. That's the most important guideline for academic writing. 

What is "academic writing"?: Insofar as our word academic comes from the grove of Akademos, where the Greek philosopher Plato taught his students, academic writing is simply writing that occurs at institutions of higher education. If so, then what are the qualities or features of the writing that occurs at institutions of higher education?

The Search for Truth: The purpose of academic writing is to search for truth, this in contrast to the purposes of what we might call “public writing” – for example, to report, to moralize, or to entertain. Perhaps with the exception of some forms of investigative journalism, public writing is not the place to search for truth: that’s the peculiar province of academic writing. Not all academic writing is true, but it must be searching for truth or else it isn’t academic writing.

Academic Writing is Analytical Writing: Academic writing is fundamentally analytical. It has the analysis of information as its origin and its raison d'être. Academic writing can do things other than analysis – like artistic writing, it can entertain; like journalistic writing, it can inform; like political writing, it can advocate a course of action. But academic writing is analytical first and foremost. Even academic writing that argues for the virtue of a certain public policy or individual action only does so because it makes a claim to a clear-sighted understanding of an issue. In academic writing, there are no politics and no ethics without analyses.

Say Something New: If the general purpose of all academic writing is to search for truth, then the specific purpose of any particular piece of academic writing is to tell us something true about the world that we don’t already know. Thus, the point of academic writing, even at the undergraduate level, is not to be right about an issue vis a vis your professor’s knowledge or the published scholarship. The purpose of academic writing is to make an original contribution to our understanding of a topic.

How to Say Something New: If academic writing is supposed to say something new, then there are two things you can do in academic writing: tell your readers about something they don’t already know about, or give your readers a new interpretation of something that everyone already knows about. For example, you can tell your readers about an unknown source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or you can give your readers a new interpretation of Hamlet, a play that everyone already knows about, but one that has some new meaning in your account of it. The vast majority of academic writing in the humanities at the undergraduate and even graduate levels will consist of providing a new interpretation of texts already known. For example, you are unlikely to discover a source for Hamlet that your professor, not to mention the Shakespeare industry at large, doesn’t already know about. But it is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that someone with your background and perspective (which is necessarily different from the background and perspective of your professors and other Shakespeareans) might produce a reading of Hamlet that shines some new light on the play.

Content is King: The key to good academic writing is content. You have to know something that others don’t if you’re going to have any success in academic writing. All the tips and strategies and methods for writing good papers are worthless and will fail you if you don’t have some knowledge that is worthy of dissemination.

Be Unusual: The only reason an academic paper needs to be written is that it gives us a new way of thinking about something that is different from (notionally better than) the usual way of thinking. Thus, you should, in your academic papers, be intentionally unusual. I hate to put it like this, but, frankly, your paper will not be an A paper if there isn’t some spark of creative, innovative, risk-taking behavior. A paper that “gets it right” but isn’t creative, innovative, or risky with its argument is a B+ at best. Most academic writing that is bad, boring, or pointless emerges because the writer is writing to get the text right instead of writing to tell someone something he or she doesn’t already know.

Writing as Exams: There is an important exception to the above rule about saying something new: when professors use papers as exams to test whether or not students have understood a certain argument or situation presented in the course. This kind of writing is not about simply regurgitating your professor’s ideas back to him or her; it’s about demonstrating your mastery of the evidence for and logic of a substantive scholarly position, one that – in your professor’s estimation – will help you make sense of the world in which you live.

Thought-Terminating Clichés: There are some topics that it should be illegal to write about unless you have multiple advanced degrees. These topics include truth, reality, and human nature. These words are “thought-terminating clichés” – that is, they halt the deep and specific thinking that is the particular province of academic writing. I have never – I repeat, never, not “rarely,” but never – had a student submit a good paper that used such terms as a key part of its argument. If you find it helpful to use such terms to cope with life, by all means do so, but please don’t use them in your academic writing, at least not for a very, very long time.

Writing as a Discipline: In the past few years, “Writing” has emerged as a distinct academic discipline, sometimes called “Rhetoric and Composition.” Previously, the art of writing was usually instructed under the auspices of the English department, but recently Departments of English have focused on exposing students to the study of literary works and their meanings, while Departments of Writing have assumed the responsibility for teaching students how to interpret things and create persuasive arguments, which may or may not be about literature.

In academic writing, there is no meaningful distinction to be made between ideas and language, between an argument and the articulation of that argument. The articulation is that argument.