Tag Archives: academic structure

How to write an academic work in Spanish (I)

Many foreign students of Spanish need to do university research works for their Spanish class, and it is always hard to find a guide about how to do this kind of academic texts. I will share some tips to those who sometimes need to write an academic text in Spanish.

I don’t want to do a very large article so I will divide the full content into various posts.

Today I will focus in

The structure of an academic text in Spanish

First of all you need an introduction (in Spanish introducción) in which you have to talk about three main things.

The topic of the text or what the text is about.The goal of the text or what is the value added to the reader. The methodology used or how you achieved that value. Also, you can talk about the most important conclusion, though this is not mandatory and maybe you want to keep something to the rest of the text.

After the introducción, you could start with some theory written by experts about your research topic. Don’t forget to add all the references in the text body and in the end of the article. How to quote in Spanish is a long topic, and maybe I will write a post about it in the future.

The theory part cold be called marco teórico, but it is very common that people use more suggestive titles that give an idea about what the text is about.

Once you have shown that you know the previous theory related with your research topic, you have to explain how you developed your research and the results that it gave.

Then you have to write the conclusions, in which you should summarize the new things that your research have add to the world.

Lastly, you need your reference list in alphabetic order. Some authors put the references in the footer if each page, but this is old fashioned and now we are trending to the final list in a full body page.

If you don’t feel comfortable with your text, you always can hire a proofreader.