“There is no patent recipe for scientific writing” is the first thing I heard during my studies.

The sentence comes from the lecturer of the course “Writing about Literature” from the first semester of my studies.

This course is explicitly designed to provide freshmen and sophomores with skills in academic writing about literary works.

In fact, throughout the semester we talked a lot about literature in general, but little about academic writing in particular.

For a long time, the art of writing good papers and essays seemed like a secret science that was only accessible to a select group of students.

It seemed to me that each individual had to find out for themselves how to put a successful text on paper.

Very few lecturers made it clear what requirements they made of us in relation to our academic texts, which went beyond compliance with the absolutely basic formalities such as font and line spacing.

How do you build a coherent argument?

How do you weave a red thread between individual sections of text?

Which linguistic style meets scientific requirements?

All of these questions were hardly ever discussed by the lecturers in my entire course, and fellow students from other subjects report similar things.

You can usually get feedback on your own text from the supervising lecturer, but usually only specific passages are discussed, while deeper-lying difficulties can hardly be uncovered.

Does success come with time?

Students neither learn anything from getting a homework without comment with a 1.0, nor from a lower grade if there is no clear catalog of evaluation criteria and the qualitative requirements for texts remain a mystery.

Both are often the case.

The causes of a text that goes bad can be manifold, but they do not necessarily have to be due to a mere lack of intelligence or diligence.

I know more fellow students who find academic writing difficult than those who find it easy.

But even within the student body, the existing difficulties are rarely discussed.

The general assumption seems to prevail that success comes with time, according to the principle of "learning by doing".

If you haven't gotten the hang of the second housework, then do the third or fourth.

But what if this approach doesn't work?

Nobody likes to talk about failures, and that's why the well-rated texts are talked about a lot more.

In my opinion, too little is said about external factors such as poor time management, procrastination or motivational problems.

In this way, however, we only increase the pressure on each other

associated with writing and is usually already big anyway.

This has neither a positive effect on the quality of the texts nor on the self-confidence of the writers.