Introduction
Everybody sometimes struggles with academic writing. The purpose of this text is to provide (not
exclusively) researchers who are at the beginning of their careers with the text that covers basics of
academic writing. We identified three rules: being correct, precise, and concise. These rules are
defined and described in following paragraphs.
Three rules of academic writing
Writing in a correct way consists of: plagiarism, honesty, and language. Being ethical means not to
plagiarise, therefore the author should cite all ideas and give credit to all relevant authors for her
study. Honesty in academic writing implies full openness about procedures of sampling, data
gathering, analysis, and interpretation. Attention during writing should be payed on grammar and
spelling because only grammatical correct and correctly spelled article will be published. Authors
are suggested to automatically check their grammar and spelling, and use dictionaries, thesaurus and
corpora. Peer review and proofreading are beneficial not only for language correctness but for
others aspect (plagiarism, honesty) as well.
Academic writing demands precision in article and paragraph structure. Main parts of the article are:
introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. This division
differs by field of research and journal requirements, which authors are bound to follow. Paragraph
organisation has its own rules. The main idea should be mentioned in the first sentence and then
extended in the following sentences. At the end of the paragraph, an example confirming the idea
should be present. When these advices are implemented, the article will be precisely structured.
Concise writing is characterised by expressing as short as possible. Therefore, authors should serve
the ideas clearly. However, this goal is not usually achieved on the first attempt, thus refactoring the
text is necessary to meet the concise criteria. Special attention should be payed on meaningless or
redundant words that do not add any information. Word count can be further reduced by
nominalisation. When following these rules, assuring the concisement of the article is more likely.
Conclusion
In the previous text, guidance for correctness, precision, and concisement was introduced. When
following the suggestions in the text, junior researchers should be able to produce articles of higher
quality. As concluding remark, we would say: "Do not think to much, just write!" or "Write first,
edit later!"