This article examines students' academic writing as an effective means of mastering the norms of the Russian literary language in higher education. Academic writing is understood as a set of skills that includes mastery of academic style, adherence to spelling, punctuation, lexical, grammatical, and stylistic norms, and the development of verbal competence. Based on an analysis of scientific literature and a lingua-stylistic study of student texts, the most common errors that hinder the creation of high-quality academic and research papers are identified. The main methodological approaches to teaching academic writing are considered, including rhetorical-compositional, genre-based, cognitive-processual, and integrative models. The importance of self-editing skills as a prerequisite for improving the normative accuracy of written speech is emphasized. It is shown that systematic practice of writing academic texts contributes to the development of academic literacy, the development of linguistic acumen, and the enhancement of the overall culture of written communication among students at a modern university.