INTRODUCTION TO ACADEMIC WRITING

Tips for getting started

1. Word processing
- Correct your word easily
- Add details later
- Change the order
- Move text about
- Present your work attractively
2. Brainstorming
- Writing down everything you know and ideas as fast as you can
3. Free association
- Write words on very fast, join some to form ideas, edit, add more until you come
up with the ones you like
4. Lists
- Ideas
- Questions
- Cross out irrelevant points
- Re-number the points later
5. Question Bank
- Note down all questions you can think of
- When? Where? Why?
6. Summing up
- Sum up your main idea in a topic
7. Think-Aloud
- Discuss topic with others
- Tape/record yourself while talking about the topic

Aspects of Academic Writing

1. Audience
2. Purpose
3. Strategy
4. Organization
5. Style

University level
- To read and think reflectively and critically
- To synthesize a large mass of research material
- To defend a position you have taken based on the analysis of the information
available

Before writing:
Figure out who will be reading your paper and what you want to accomplish through it.
Determine your Audience and your Purpose.

Questions to gather the relevant information:

 - To whom am I writing?
- Professional background?
- Personal preference
- Use to the readers?
- Intend to accomplish?
- Purpose consistent with audiences needs?

In collecting data
- Available library resources
- Writing letters of inquiry
- Conducting personal interviews

ANALYZING YOUR AUDIENCE

Knowing your audience will influence the way you present your material.

1. Particular audience
- Similar academic background
- Jargons: similar terms and concepts
2. General audience
- More diverse audience
- Simplest terms

Textual features for audience (Elements constituting Style):

1. Tone
- Personal? Friendly? Distanced? Humorous? Serious?
2. Word choice
- Jargon/formal/professional language or very simple colloquial?
3. Argument
- Convincing? Evidence?
4. Sentence types/lengths
- Long, complex patterns or short, simple one, or combination?
5. Message
- Readers care about? Readers likely to act upon?

ANALYZING YOUR PURPOSE

First question:
- Why am I writing?
- What is my goal or purpose for writing?

Long-range purpose: To communicate to a particular audience

- Understanding your purpose for writing will make you a better writer
- More than to demonstrate certain language skills or to reinforce the learning of
the language itself

Purposes:
 - To entertain
- To provoke thought and reflection
- To provide a record of events
- To influence an opinion
- To request information

One common factor of writing: strength of a feeling which compels them to put pen to
paper
- Relative brevity and accessibility makes a useful starting point for considering the
importance of purpose

ANALYZING YOUR STRATEGY

- Strategy for effective argument

Unskilled writers
1. Understanding: narrow, in terms of topic/subject only (angle only in what the
instructor wants)
2. Delay the actual writing
- Figure out detail before beginning
- Fear or writers block
3. Try to write the paper perfectly (carefully and critically) in the first draft
- Punctuation, exact wording
- Reading over and over
- Revise only at single words and sentences
- X Revision as eliminating errors and better words
- Writing process as discrete and orderly steps
4. Try to sound/say like they think they are supposed to sound (impress readers)
5. Little concept of the reader
6. Read silently and keep their writing to themselves

Skilled writers
1. Understanding context of academic discourse (considerations of purpose,
audience and self)
- Choose subject and their angle based on their own experiences and what they
really care about within the guidelines set by the assignment
2. Knows it takes more effort not to write than to simply begin writing
- Start writing, keeping a receptive mind
- Writers block: phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or
continue writing usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity (Fear of failure
Everything they write is not going to be nor should it be perfect)
3. Write quickly at early stages
- Trust inner voice, expect mistakes, dont worry with punctuation or exact words
- Revision as finding what they want to say, revise extensively (meaning and
structure)
- Zooming the whole essay to small detail and back again
4. Authentic voice to write through
 - Truth, inform or persuade
5. Picture someone reading their writing posing readers questions, objections
and confusions
6. Read writing out loud feedback and internalized checklists

ORGANIZATION

Structure
- Helps make ideas clear, guides readers comprehension and strengthen your
arguments
Introduction
- What to expect
Body
- Logically one point/idea per paragraph
- Appropriate linkage so the reader can draw explanation or argument
Conclusion
- Draw all points and ideas

1. Let your Thesis statement direct you

- Research to determine your hypothesis
- Thesis promises
2. Putting your Argument in a Graphic organizer
- Plan for organizing all your points
- Diagram with ideas
- In the center at the bottom with cluster point
Graphic organizer
- Important tool for it allows you to explore visually the connections among your
ideas
3. Preparing a Preliminary outline
- Find your papers best structure = best supports the argument that you intend to
make
- Choose and eliminate ideas
- Thesis control the direction of outline?
- Main points relevant?
- Can points be moved around without changing something important?
- Preliminary outline seem logical?
- Argument progress or stall?
- Argument take a turn, mid-stream or anticipate that turn?
- Sufficient support for points?
- Room in outline for other points of view?
- Outline reflect thorough thoughtful argument? Covered the ground?
4. Doing the research
5. Modes of development: Patterns for structuring your paper
a. Analogy: making comparison between 2 topics that initially seem unrelated
b. Cause and Effect: explaining why something happened or the influence of one
event upon another
 c. Compare and Contrast: finding similarities and/or differences between 2 things
d. Definition: illustrating the meaning of certain words or ideas
e. Description: relating what you see, hear, taste, feel and smell
f. Division and Classification: grouping ideas, objects or events into categories
g. Narration: telling a story
h. Process: describing a sequence of steps necessary to produce something
i. Problem-solution: describing a situation or identifying a problem and evaluating a
solution

TONE AND STYLE

Tone
- Writers attitude toward the reader and the subject of the message
- Overall tone affects the reader just as ones tone of voice affects the listener in
everyday exchanges
- Impersonal, objective tone maintaining formal distance

Avoid:
1. Judgmental language
- Personal judgment based on previously-held beliefs and values rather than
letting the evidence guide the inquiry
- X Justification based on evidence
- I believe, I feel, I conclude, it seems, I think, should, need to, it is good, it is bad,
it is right, it is wrong
2. Emotive language
- Emotions or values
- Persuasive X evidence
- Writers feelings
- History has provided us with great heroes.

Academic Writing
- Discipline and thoughtfulness
- Formal and structured
- Communicate clearly and unambiguously

LANGUAGE FEATURES
- Often abstract and complex
- The use of many language and grammatical device

Contributes to the formality of a writing:

- Impersonal constructions/avoidance of personal language
- Modal verbs/use of passive voice
- Technical language
- Nominalizations/complex noun or nominal groups

Major influences:
 - Degree to which academic words, academic structures and academic
conventions are used

Academic words
a. Formality/informality of the language used
b. Amount of abstract and technical language included
c. Amount of impersonal vs personal language
d. Language used

Academic conventions
a. How and to what degree attitude and opinions are expressed
b. Amount of evidence that is provided to support an opinion

Academic structures
a. Degree to which abstract language is used
b. Amount of content and contextual information embedded into noun phrases
c. Use of passive voice

ACADEMIC WRITING produced in a context that values:

1. Analytical skills
2. Independent thinking
3. Critical disposition
4. Orientation towards ideas
5. Ability to rise above the personal and the communal

Academic writing
1. Clear structure
2. Fewer clauses per sentence but more words per clause
3. More nouns and fewer verbs
4. Makes less use of coordination and greater use of subordination
5. Always third-person
6. Limited use of personal pronouns
7. Avoids colloquial vocabulary
8. Avoids contractions
9. Avoids words that have emotional or attitudinal connotations
10. Avoids phrasal verbs
11. Uses linguistic hedges to qualify generalizations
Writing is:
- Thinking
- Unique to each individual
- Process
- Meant to be read and understood

Expository writing explains

WRITING AS A RECURSIVE PROCESS

Writing (Gardner and Johnson)

- Fluid process created by writers as they work
- Not highly organized linear process, but continual movement between the
different steps of the writing model

Each step connected to each other

1. Pre-writing
- Outline
- Main arguments
- Grow from working plans for papers

Tentative outline
- Plan based on what you are learning from your research
- Answers: what do I know a lot about? What do I need to research more?

Working outline
- Supports her thesis
- Establishes order and relationship bet minor and major points

2. Drafting
- Telling what you know and think about your topic
- Relationship between ideas
- Similar or different
- Cause or effect
- Solution

3. Revising for second draft

- Evaluating and refining the rough draft for clarity and effectiveness
- Effective documents
- Think about readers needs and expectations
- Reader centered
- Refine your prose, making each sentence as concise and accurate as possible
- Connections between ideas explicit and clear

4. Editing
- Proofreading and correcting your draft for conventions
- Check grammar, mechanics, spelling and format
- Spell check last thing

5. Publishing
- Presenting a final product for the intended audience