What comes into your mind when you think of writing in college?   When new  undergraduate students were asked how they thought academic writing would be different from other kinds of writing, most mentioned differences in vocabulary and grammar.   Some expected to be writing five-paragraph essays.  This is understandable because a lot of high school writing is designed to prepare students for college entrance exams, where they must be quick, well-organized, and accurate.

College-level writing differs from secondary school (high school) because the goals and learning environment are different.  Not all of the skills you developed and information you learned before college will be useful.  You must discover which of your skills are relevant and which are not.

Before college, many students encountered writing assignments only in their English classes, which may have had a language-learning goal (like practicing vocabulary or grammar structures).  The purpose may have been to assess  proficiency in language use or  reading comprehension of assigned texts.

In college, writing will be more about explaining your thinking or expanding what you have learned in class.  The focus will be on content, not language-learning.  Often you will be asked to find and read texts other than those assigned in your course. These are called “sources” because they are sources of information that teach you and help you support your thinking.

If you have written academic papers with sources, these steps may be familiar:

While these steps are efficient and do produce a paper, their primary goal may have been for you to prove that you could find information on a topic,  and use paraphrases, quotations, and cite sources. In other words, the content may not have been the primary focus.

The papers you write in college have a different goal:  to support content and demonstrate critical thinking about that content. They approach knowledge differently.  Education researchers explain the difference this way: