academic writing skills course

academic writing skills course

Academic Writing Skills Course

1. Introduction

By doing this, you will build your own understanding and learn things more deeply. This is what I ask you to do during this course. This academic writing course is designed to help you think about the processes of how you can improve your writing. Some say that the most difficult aspect of writing is getting started. While this may be true because starting always involves something new, it can also be the most gratifying! Think about it – the blank page, the cursor blinking…you are completely in charge and anything can happen. This is also what makes writing such an excellent learning process. Writing involves a new sense of clarity. Clarity of thought. We often think we understand something until we try to write it down. This is where the flaws in reasoning often appear. Clarity of understanding – we often don’t understand something until we try to write it. Try this with note making by doing a little experiment and using only minimal notes from a text you understand well, try to write a summary. Now take the text and compare the two. How well do they match? The act of writing something down is forever intertwined with gaining an understanding of some kind.

2. Understanding the Writing Process

Session Stage of writing process Getting started – Beginning to write the assignment Clearly understanding the topic – Understanding the question Making the assignment question more specific – Understanding the question Fine-tuning the assignment question – Understanding the question Creating a skeleton plan – Planning Developing a detailed plan – Planning Start writing – Refer to your plan Stop! Think it over! – Break! Plan Editing and proofreading (just one of many cycles) – Improve style and grammar Final overview check – Is it finished?

The following table maps the taught sessions onto the different stages of the writing process. You may find it useful to print it out and annotate it with dates and details of the related assignment to keep track of your writing. Give yourself deadlines for completing each stage. It is not usual to write a perfect first draft; various stages are repeated many times. Take a break from your writing between these stages to allow yourself some objectivity.

3. Developing Effective Research Skills

Problem solving is an essential skill when developing effective research. You will encounter many problems that will hinder your progression and use of initiative is required to overcome these. This may involve finding a book or article and realizing that it is not helpful, out-of-date, or located in a faraway place! This may waste a lot of your time, however, there are ways to avoid this such as checking the publication date on library catalogs or looking at recent reviews on the text. Always evaluate the resource there and then in terms of whether it is related to what you are looking for and whether it may be useful for future reference. Often you will find a very relevant article and then forget where you saw it. It is therefore essential that you keep a record of all sources that you use. This will also benefit you in avoiding unnecessary repetition.

Firstly, you must work out exactly what you need to know. This sounds very simple, however, you will often begin to read around the topic and access information that is unrelated to what you are looking for. To avoid this, take a copy of the title of your assignment and underline all the key words. Read through the questions you are trying to answer or the statement you are analyzing and also underline the key words. Keep these at hand whenever you are looking for information and often refer back to them to make sure you are heading in the right direction. Now, knowing exactly what you need to know, you will find that it is much easier to access the specific information required.

The general approach to effective research is a simple one. Research is finding information and involves a systematic and organized effort to find answers to questions. Whether it is to satisfy your own curiosity or to further support and develop your assignments, the basic principles remain the same.

4. Mastering the Art of Structuring Academic Essays

The problem often occurs because they do not understand what it takes to write a good essay. As a result, failure to meet the minimum standard for marks on their assignment can be a huge knock to a student’s confidence and motivation. These students stand to benefit most from improving their essay writing skill, but that improvement involves more than just learning how to write a proper sentence. Frustration can occur if you do not know how to improve your writing. This course is designed to help you in developing your writing style with clear explanation on the methods of improving your writing.

Ensuring that you will have the right essay structure is the first step towards ensuring that your paper will be a success. This involves organizing your ideas and information in a logical and coherent manner. This will make it easier for you to prove your points, and help your reader fully understand your argument. Even a great thesis statement can be ruined by a poor essay structure. After constantly getting low marks on assignments, some students eventually lose confidence in their writing and come to believe that they cannot write well.

It is particularly good for students new to academic writing as it provides comprehensive support on all aspects of writing an essay. Understand the importance of staying on the topic and of avoiding irrelevancy. Understand the importance of the thesis statement. Know how to organise an essay into paragraphs, documenting on what each paragraph should contain. Ways to develop the argument: Often students fail or get low grades because they fail to develop their arguments. During this course, you will learn various techniques to help you develop the argument so that your reader can follow and understand your writing. Generally, you’ll be required to write an essay or assignment and this is something that can cause headaches.

5. Enhancing Clarity and Coherence in Writing

We exercise 15 in module two. Before we initiate the tutorial, we present some background information on the data that we use. The data come from two related experiments. It was collected to study the processing of emotional information or information that is personally relevant to the perceiver. The experiments involved two types of stimuli, and in each experiment, participants were asked to form an impression of the person in a photo and then to form an impression of themselves. In other words, they make two self-other judgments. In one experiment, the stimuli were 48 photos of faces of actors assuming emotional expressions of anger or happiness. An equal number of males and females were represented. In the other experiment, the stimuli were 48 descriptions of negative and positive events. So there are both four cells of photo descriptions and four cells of written descriptions. We will discuss analyses of photos for brevity, but they are similar to those for written descriptions.