: Re: What's the difference between academic and journalistic writing? I'm not talking about "boring" academic papers that are 99% science and 0% interesting. But in comments on a draft of my senior

@Cooney417

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Note that this answer comes 8 years and 4 months after the question was asked. It's probably not useful to the original poster (who likely has a spouse, two kids, a career, and a mortgage to worry about now), but may be of use to others.
At any rate...
The difference between journalistic and academic writing is mainly the difference between rhetorical and analytical modes of persuasion. In brief:

The rhetorical mode tries to persuade by 'painting a picture' that people can intuitively grasp. It relies on the innate capacity of the reader to sympathetically engage with a narrative, and uses that narrative to lead the reader to the author's conclusion.
The analytical mode tries to persuade by laying out an assortment of 'facts' and demonstrating that these 'facts' can only be understood within a particular structure of logic and reason. The analytical mode tends to break narrative structures by forcing the reader to confront logical inconsistencies.

Good journalists and good academics will obviously do a bit of both in their writing, but if we think in terms of the ancient Greek triad of logos, pathos, and ethos — appeals to logic, emotions, and moral sense, respectively — academic work learn towards logos, journalism leans towards pathos, and both try to structure an ethos in which their conclusions stand out as meaningful and correct. Neither mode is right or wrong; they are both useful and appropriate in their proper context.
Younger writers tend to write rhetorically; this is a given. They use colloquial speech to give their writing emotional depth and power; they gloss over analytical arguments on the assumption that the reader will intuitively understand the point; they worry more about issues of self-presentation and appearance than about leveraging substantive 'facts' within a structured argument. People in general have a journalistic bent, preferring a good narrative over sound reasoning, so it is common to see senior theses with a distinctly journalistic flavor. No worries. Developing the skill of analysis is an uphill battle for most people (not to diminish the skills involved in journalistic writing), because analysis asks people to give up their normal expectation of sympathetic understanding and write from an uncomfortably cold, depersonalized perspective. But it is a rewarding battle for anyone, even if one is only going to write journalistically.

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