The Referencing Skill on Academic Writing

Academic writing differs from other types of writing such as creative writing, which is the kind of writing
you do when you write stories, it is also different from personal writing which is kind of informal writing
that use slang, abbreviations, and incomplete sentences. Academic writing appeals to logical and
provides evidence support of an intellectual positions. It's important to present the argument in logical
order and to arrive conclusions. However, academic writing is formal writing, so we should not use slang,
take care to write complete sentence and to organize them in a certain way.

As a student of English, academic writing in English is probably different from academic writing in our
native language. The words, grammar, and also the way of organizing ideas are probably different from
what we are used to. The students who are not native speakers of English often find the written
demands of their course very challenging. In addition to the vocabulary of academic English writing, they
have to learn conventions of style, referencing and format. Issues of arround vocabulary, plagiarism and
refencing skills are significant additiomal worries.

In modern era, there are several ways to obtain references, the most effective way is the World Wide
Web. It has revolutioned how academic finds information. We can find information from previous papers
in electronic journals on the internet. According to the Junni (2007), the internet is an actractive medium
for seeking and obtaining information. In searching these latter resource, we have roamed well our own
disipline, we have to spend time to search information in internet.

Internet has many benefit for academic to obtain information, such as:

1. Internet is accesible on 24 hours a day

2. Academic don't have visit a library
3. It's possible to find and obtain information relative quickly and conveniently
4. The academic can choose between saving, printing or reading the information from the
computer screen
5. The sources are often more up to date than in paper format.

Referencing skill is not easy for the student who is not good in vocabulary, they have spend time to
understand the journals or articles which want to become as reference. Actually we don't have to
translate the word by word to get the meaning of the sentence. Taking notes and write down the outline
in our language is probably can help us to obtain understanding of the references, we can use our
smartphone because in this era there are many application which can help us to translate English in our
language.

Not only the referencing skills, the problems of being an academic writer is keeping track of information
that might be useful in the future. Basically, that means we need the effective way to store the relevant
publication with our writing.
Anne (2009) stated that an important part of the research and planning process is taking notes of the
information and ideas that you find. Marking and writing down the important things we read will help us
to remember and understand them better. These is the several tips of taking notes:

1. Create a spearate wprd document for each section of the paper

2. Highlight or underline the important information
3. Attention the background information about topic which is necessary for our paper
4. Attention the arguments and explanation which support the ideas
5. Attention facts, examples, experts opinion and the other supporting details
6. Don't forget to write the author's name to avoid plagiaris

Academic writing's process is complex and difficult, however the academic writing is process of
becoming a writer that leads us to many new discoveries about ourselves, our ideas, the world in which
we live, and about our professional identities as academic, teachers, researchers, and scholars.

References:

Hartley, James. 2008. Academic Writing and Publishing. New York: Routledge

Junni, P. 2007. Students Seeking Information for their Masters' thesis: The Effect of the Internet. Retrieved
18 July 2007 from Information Research, 12(2), paper 305 (http://InformationR.net/ir/12-
2paper305.html).

Whitaker, Anne. 2009. Academic Writing Guide. Slovakia: Universoty of Seatle