Academic Writing At University Level Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Advice and resources to support you with writing effectively at postgraduate level. ewriting online course open access : specifically developed for postgraduate students, it covers many aspects of writing successfully at university. school level support: take advantage of any writing development sessions organised through or learning materials offered by your school or course. Your lecturers will expect accurate attribution of ideas from others including academic and other authors, and the ideas of those who teach you , written pieces to be logically structured with fluid expression of thought, and with deeper and more critical engagement with the subjects and ideas you are reading and learning about.

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At the very highest level, you are aiming to write to the style you read in academic journals. If you are studying either whilst still working, or during a career break, you need to be aware that academic writing is a different skill from workplace writing for example, academic writing is usually more formal. Work needs to be grounded in and backed up by appropriate and informed opinion and sources, rather than solely by personal opinion and personal experience. Become familiar with the expected way of writing by reading good quality examples.

Ask your lecturers if they can share short examples of good quality postgraduate level writing. You could consider asking others on your programme if you could learn from examples of their writing. However, you would need to be very careful not to use anyone else’s ideas or work and express them as your own.

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If others do not want to share samples of their writing with you, accept their decision. For many people, their adult, independent life really begins when they apply to college and succeed. And it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this independence is expressed not only in physical separation from parents and other members of family, but the fact that now they are treated seriously and should treat themselves likewise. The same goes with writing – now they are on their own and have nobody to blame for mistakes but themselves. some of the distinctive features of writing at this level are as follows: college essay may be 10 words long or even more and the topics both chosen by you and imposed by your tutors are supposed to be generally controversial, so you should be ready not only to describe things and express your own opinion. It should be based on solid research no writing off the cuff about things you have no idea of. These essays are to a very large degree to test your research skills, not to let you show how awesome a person you are.

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By that time you should completely and utterly understand that borrowing materials word for word is a very bad idea in our age of online plagiarism checking software. By the time you get into college, you should already know that not only writing, but also the way it is presented matters. Formatting is the thing you should master in order to get good marks or, in fact, to get any marks at all.

Depending on the subject you have chosen, you may deal with different styles of formatting be sure to study a corresponding manual before you set about to work. When you are at college, your teachers expect you to be independent not only as a person, but also as a writer. The fact that you are at college means that you have already taken some decision of what you are going to do with your life and you are not a random person in your selected vocation. You are supposed to be interested in your studies, in these topics, to deepen them and offer your own personal opinion and perception of them.

Throughout school you are taught grammar rules and vocabulary tools to become a good writer. Unfortunately, many of us haven rsquo t learned how to combine these skills in an effective way. This is particularly intimidating for those who are about to head to college since you will be required to turn in many writing assignments. However, the good news is that since writing is a process, there are ways to improve. You should always make sure you understand the purpose of your writing and who your audience is. Depending on the assignment, you may need to collect data, research, or interview people. Creating an outline is a great way to organize your thoughts and keep your paper ldquo on track.

Rdquo if you created a detailed outline, you can refer back to it to make sure you include all your important points. The structure of your paper may vary, but most papers require an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. No matter what your topic, you need to communicate your point in an intelligent and straightforward way. Ldquo big rdquo words and complicated sentence structure do not improve your paper if the reader cannot understand your point. While fixing grammar mistakes is important, you should fix structural errors before working on grammar issues. It may take several drafts before your point is clear and presented in a way in which your audience understands. During the editing process, taking a break and returning in an hour or even a few days later may help you find errors that you did not see before.

Reading your paper out loud or from the end to the beginning are other ways that can help you find mistakes, inconsistencies, or illogical arguments. Some students make very smooth transitions from writing in high school to writing in college, and we heartily wish all of you an easy passage. But other students are puzzled and frustrated by their experiences in writing for college classes. Only months earlier your writing was winning praise now your instructors are dissatisfied, saying that the writing isn't quite there yet, saying that the writing is lacking something.

You haven't changed your writing is still mechanically sound, your descriptions are accurate, you're saying smart things. Some of the criticism is easy to understand: it's easy to predict that standards at college are going to be higher than in high school. But it is not just a matter of higher standards: often, what your instructors are asking of you is not just something better.

If that's the case, then you won't succeed merely by being more intelligent or more skillful at doing what you did in high school. We should note here that a college is a big place and that you'll be asked to use writing to fulfill different tasks. You'll find occasions where you'll succeed by summarizing a reading accurately and showing that you understand it.

There may be times when you're invited to use writing to react to a reading, speculate about it. Far more often like every other week you will be asked to analyze the reading, to make a worthwhile claim about it that is not obvious state a thesis means almost the same thing , to support your claim with good reasons, all in four or five pages that are organized to present an argument. In college, an argument is something less contentious and more systematic: it is a set of statements coherently arranged to offer three things that experienced readers expect in essays that they judge to be thoughtful: they expect to see a claim that would encourage them to say, that's interesting.

They expect to see evidence, reasons for your claim, evidence that would encourage them to agree with your claim, or at least to think it plausible. They expect to see that you've thought about limits and objections to your claim. Almost by definition, an interesting claim is one that can be reasonably challenged. This kind of argument is less like disagreeable wrangling, more like an amiable and lively conversation with someone whom you respect and who respects you someone who is interested in what you have to say, but will not agree with your claims just because you state them someone who wants to hear your reasons for believing your claims and also wants to hear answers to their questions. At this point, some students ask why they should be required to convince anyone of anything. After all, they say, we are all entitled to our opinions, so all we should have to do is express them clearly. This point of view both misunderstands the nature of argument and ignores its greatest value.