If you plan to progress within your academic field — that is, you want to become a professor or a research worker in the field, you'll eventually need to publish your academic writing. The best place to publish academic writing is in scholarly journals specific to your field. It may be nice to have an article in a magazine or your local newspaper, but such publication credits don't carry as much significance with academic-related employers and universities who are looking at your application.

You should recognize that these journals may have different criteria for evaluating documentation, writing style, or format than the professor who first graded your paper. Be sure to find out the format in which journals want to see manuscripts. Comply with these guidelines to the letter.

Most academic publications have more stringent requirements than professors do for student writing submitted in their courses. They will require your ideas and research to be even more significant and original than student papers, and the demand for familiarity with any relevant writing in the field will be much greater. Refine your work to its peak of perfection before submitting. Frequently, this will mean rewriting the paper several more times.

You may also need to alter the content of your article. Determine whether there is an innovative approach to your paper that will be more significant. Perhaps changing the thesis slightly will make it fit better within a specific journal's area of concern.

Academic writing can be a daunting challenge, especially if you are inexperienced with writing and your area of study is mostly unrelated to language usage. However, the key to academic writing is organization. You don't need to be a brilliant wordsmith to write a good paper, even one deserving of publication. You just need to document correctly, establish and maintain your direction, and organize your thoughts.