GRASP
Research writing is hard, and this is why
May 13th, 2026, by
Many HDR students start their research with a wealth of experience and expertise behind them. Yet, when it comes time to write, it feels unexpectedly difficult. The ideas are there, but translating that into a coherent, scholarly document can feel like an entirely new challenge.
Research writing is, indeed, challenging. It requires a unique set of skills, conventions and ways of thinking that are rarely explicitly taught. Many students are expected to absorb it as if by osmosis, simply by being around expert writers (aka their supervisor) and reading scholarly works.
Fortunately, research writing skills can be learned and practiced, and a good place to start is understanding the aspects of research writing that make it challenging.
Seeing writing as thinking
A common misperception about research writing is that it happens in the final stage of the research process, when you knuckle down after the research has been done, to write it all up. However, writing needs to be an integral part of the research process itself as it is the means by which a lot of necessary thinking gets done.
When you put your ideas into words, you are testing whether your thoughts hold together and whether there are gaps in your argument. You make connections between ideas that weren’t possible when they were floating around in your head. Writing is more than being a means of communicating your ideas, it is a part of the thinking process itself.
This means you don’t need to have everything figured out before you start writing, and in fact, waiting until you do can impede your progress. Just as you need to be thinking about your research from day one, so too you need be writing from the start - and continuing to write - until the day you hit that ‘submit’ button.
Understanding writing as conversation
When you write as an HDR student, you are not writing into a void, but entering an ongoing conversation, an exchange between researchers about what is known, what is not known, and what are the questions worth asking. You are making a contribution to the conversation by bringing new evidence and insights. You are situating your writing in relation to what others have said, building on, or questioning established ideas.
As part of the scholarly conversation, your research writing is likely to be oriented around three core questions:
- What are you trying to find out?
- How did you conduct the research?
- What have you discovered?
These questions give your writing a clear purpose and help you communicate that purpose to your reader.
Writing for your audience.
Academic writing is formal, precise and always framed in relation to existing scholarship. Citation and referencing is critical in positioning yourself alongside others, and building and verifying knowledge within an academic community. While as an HDR student, your primary audience is other academics, more specifically, it is your thesis examiners.
Your examiners will be looking to see that you have answered your research question, that your approach is rigorous, and that your contribution is original and significant. Indeed, the purpose of the thesis, aside from making a contribution to the scholarly conversation, is ultimately to demonstrate that you have developed the skills of a professional researcher - that you can identify a problem worth investigating, design an appropriate approach, execute it carefully, and interpret what you find.
Understanding different modes of writing
Academic writing is not a singular genre of writing but a crafting together of different modes of writing. As Tara Brabazon points out, there are four main types of academic writing that appear throughout a thesis: descriptive, critical, analytical and persuasive.
Descriptive writing presents information clearly and accurately, such as what happened or what was done. It is commonly used in a methods section, where your job is to describe or explain your approach to conducting the research. It’s the most straightforward type of writing in the thesis, and often the easiest place to start.
Critical writing goes beyond describing what others have said to evaluating and interpreting it. It might critique or synthesise the arguments presented by researchers, situate ideas in an intellectual context, or show how existing scholarship relates to your own work. It will invariably be used in a literature review, but will also appear anywhere in the thesis that calls for critical engagement.
Analytical writing takes ideas or data and organises them into meaningful patterns - finding a structure, making sense of it, and placing an order around it. This type of writing is commonly found in findings, results or discussion sections, where you are required to go beyond presenting what you found to showing what it means and how the pieces relate.
Persuasive writing argues for a position. It is how you make a case for why your research question matters, what your findings show, and what should be concluded. This mode of writing is particularly important in your introduction and conclusion, but it runs through the whole thesis. Your thesis is making a single, coherent (albeit very complex) argument, and evidence-based persuasive writing is how you make it effectively.
Knowing the conventions of your discipline
Effective research writing also requires you to know the writing conventions of your discipline. Different disciplines have their own vocabularies, their own relationships with evidence, and different approaches to structure and argument. For example, a literature review in an experimental science thesis may be relatively brief, serving mainly to establish the gap your research addresses. In the social sciences, the literature review often builds the theoretical framework through which you then interpret your data, and may be more analytical. In a humanities thesis, engagement with the literature may be woven throughout the entire work, and not confined to a single chapter.
The best way to learn your discipline’s conventions is read widely in your field, paying attention not just to what is being argued but to how - how writers position themselves, how they use sources and evidence, how they build an argument, and how they use language to express their ideas.
Final thoughts
Research writing is an integral and ongoing part of the research process, a way of thinking, connecting ideas, and contributing to a broader scholarly conversation. It is a complex and challenging task, employing a range of writing modes - descriptive, critical, analytical, and persuasive - while at the same time adhering to (or perhaps departing from or challenging) disciplinary conventions in order to communicate effectively to the intended audience. Fortunately, they are all learnable skills, and through consistent writing practice you’ll be able to communicate your research with confidence and impact.
Resources to develop academic writing
Vlog 230 - What is academic writing?, a YouTube video from Tara Brabazon.
What is research writing? and any other chapters in Research and Writing Skills for Academic and Graduate Researchers, RMIT https://rmit.pressbooks.pub/researchwritingmodules/ a set of modules “for academic and higher degree researchers who want to develop and extend the skills required in the contemporary research environment.”
Improve your writing. Griffiths University offers two self-paced tutorials: ‘Improving the tone and style of your academic writing’ and ‘Conveying the argument in academic writing’.
How to write like a researcher, Ideas Hub blog post, October 21, 2025.
Please make any anonymous comments/ feedback, or suggestions for further posts at this link. If you would like to get in touch, or write a post for the Ideas Hub blog, please email karen.miller@curtin.edu.au. Contributions from HDR students are welcome!
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash