Academic Literacy Skills a Guide to Successful Essay Writing Text

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Academic literacy refers to the critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills learned within the academic society. Academic literacy allows an individual to effectively establish communication within all areas of his academic environment. To become academically literate, a person has to familiarize himself with the levels of communication that exist. Academic literacy is a vast topic there fore in order to define and understand the topic it must be broken into segments. Academic literacy has an array of sectors that must first be met to achieve academic literacy. In order to become academically one has to become familiar with academic discourse.

Academic discourse is a type of writing and speaking skills that are used in specific fields. These discourse conventions are a way that people in a specific field communicate using certain terminology. Academic exposition refers to critical thinking and writing strategies that are used to help people communicate effectively.

These cultural categories consist of an author's race, nationality, class, age, profession, gender, and region basic demographics. When he wrote a theme for english b вќ he was a young twenty two year old, lower class student. At this point in his life he lacked personal identification, until he was able to find himself in poetry.

Another strategy of academic exposition is the comparing and contrasting of an author read the passage below then answer the eight questions that follow. from the age of the unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it 1 gertrude stein was born in allegheny, pennsylvania, on february 3, 1874. Her father, daniel, was a german jewish immigrant who had made a fortune in the american railway boom of the nineteenth century but held, somewhere, the idea and hope of the kind of polish a feeling for european life might give his children. When gertrude was a girl, he moved the family briefly back across the atlantic before finally settling in oakland, california, where gertrude spent her teen years. It was a well rounded, prosperous, comfortable beginning, one intended to produce a well rounded, prosperous life with all the usual accoutrements of family, stability, and friends. In fact, however, it produced a woman who was to become one of the most important aesthetic arbiters of her day.

Stein caught a taste for europe early and realized quickly that she would never be at home in the united states. It wasn't only that the puritanical traditions of american life chafed against her modern sensibility and bohemian habits it was also that europe was where she was most likely to see what interested her most: a collision between old and new. 2 stein returned to europe in her twenties, settled in paris, and quickly became a sort of den mother to the most successful artists and writers and dancers of her age. They were, she recognized, moving right along the fault line that riveted her, the one that separated the classical european way of life, with its balls, carriages, and victorian sensibilities, from what she spotted around her: the dances of nijinsky, the sentences of joyce, the paintings of braque. She loved the speed of its trains, the way the renault factories in croissy worked around the clock, the hustle of immigrants on the paris streets. Almost like a collector of great art, she began to collect great talent: ernest hemingway, f. Scott fitzgerald, pablo picasso, and a dozen other great names of the revolution that became known as modernism.

What made stein so successful in this endeavor wasn't only her ambition or her intellect or the strength of her own talent which was debatable. It was that her way of thinking and seeing, her curiosity about the collision of old and new, was perfectly tuned for a moment when europe was, cataclysmically, struggling with that collision. She was a woman alive to the great theme of her day, the at once violent, at once beautiful movement from one way of living to another.

3 if there was a single moment when she felt a sense of the harmony between her instincts and her environment most clearly, it might have been on a paris street in the sixth arrondissement one night shortly after the start of world war i. Stein and picasso were walking home from a dinner, when a french military convoy rolled past them. It looked different: the sides of the trucks and the cabs had been splotched unevenly with different colors of paint. Stein wrote later, i very well remember being with picasso on the boulevard raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and picasso amazed looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism! 1 4 this is quite a scene mdash the saturnine stein, forty years old, and the diminutive thirty three year old spanish genius, exulting together in a fresh aesthetic surprise of the great war.

That war became for stein the defining moment of her sense of aesthetics and history. It wasn't simply that the war destroyed so many lives it was also that it destroyed an older idea of order. You are, all of you, a lost generation, stein told hemingway when he showed up in paris after the war. It was that same confused geography she had in mind when marking out the way the war had been fought, the way it looked, and the landscape it left behind. The composition of this war, stein wrote, was not a composition in which there was one man in the center surrounded by many others but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition in which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism. 5 what stein was sensing, marked out on those trucks or the paintings on the walls of her apartment, was, for its age, very much like what we are feeling now, a violent change in the way the world appears to work.

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If you've ever stared at a great cubist painting, you know that the movement proposed a radically different way of seeing. But there are important similarities between her historical moment and ours: a sense of new complexities, fresh interactions, and a speed that bedraggles old language and confuses old ideas. Statesmen of world war i lamented afterward that if only the negotiations in the days before the first mobilization had not been conducted by telegraph, the war might have been avoided.

The problem, they said, was that none of the kings or foreign ministers of europe had accustomed themselves to the speed of information, to the quantity of it that became available when telegraphs replaced letters. And in their confusion, they felt they had to act and decide at the then blistering speed of a telegraph machine. 6 every important historical moment is marked by these sorts of shifts to new models of living, which expand in velocity and complexity well past what the current ways of thinking can handle. And usually the source of the greatest historical disasters is that so few people at the time either recognize or understand the shift.

1 cubism: visual art style of the early twentieth century in which images were generally fractured into geometric facets from: the age of the unthinkable by joshua cooper ramo. In paragraph 1, the repetition of the phrase well rounded, prosperous emphasizes

    the sophistication of stein's family the predictability of the life stein rejected the flowering of stein's creative powers the contempt for convention stein embodied
answer correct response: b. this item requires examinees to analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone. In paragraph 1, the author's repetition of the phrase well rounded, prosperous focuses attention on the stable, orderly world that stein left behind when she decided to pursue her fascination with the collision between old and new models of living in europe. In paragraph 2, the author develops the idea that europe was where stein was most likely to see what interested her most primarily by
    contrasting the classical european way of life with the dances of nijinsky, the sentences of joyce, the paintings of braque describing paris in terms of the speed of its trains and the hustle of immigrants stating that stein began to collect great talent: ernest hemingway, f. Scott fitzgerald, pablo picasso identifying stein as a woman alive to the great theme of her day
answer correct response: a. this item requires examinees to determine the central ideas of a text and analyze their development. What most interested stein was the collision between old and new models of living. By juxtaposing the balls, carriages, and victorian sensibilities of old europe with the cultural innovation of modernist artists and writers such as nijinsky, joyce, and braque, the author develops the idea that europe was the epicenter of this collision.

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