This post is for weaker students who are having problems with writing longer texts: write short simple sentences! If your teacher can’t understand what you are saying then your marks will plummet (my students of English for International Finance will know the meaning!). Look at this paragraph from a website about the rise of house prices:
One of the main factors in the UK housing market is the acute shortage of housing, especially in popular areas. This means that even a very small increase in demand has a proportionally bigger increase in price.
Understand the main point? Yes! It’s a great example of clarity in writing. Academic writing is a vehicle for IDEAS. Good academic writing is not noticed at all, because the reader can just focus on the content.
In fact, you don’t need to be very inventive at all. Just use one of a small variety of sentence patterns you can see from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University here.