Effective Academic Writing

An essay-writing handbook for school and university.
Effective Academic Writing is a workbook for high school and university students who are keen to understand and improve their academic writing skills.
It provides students and teachers with a framework for understanding writing and offers many useful writing activities at sentence, paragraph and essay level for learning and teaching.
The book explains four highly valued essay types which university students are expected to write. These are information reports, explanations, expositions and discussions. In addition, managing essay questions, citations and evidence are also addressed and practised.
This book takes the mystery out of academic writing. With this workbook, novice writers will be able to approach the writing process with new found confidence.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
TOPIC 1 THE BIG PICTURE
- Academic culture
- Critical stance
- Persuasive writing
- Judgement
- Spoken and written language
- Social purpose and context
- Academic writing
- Essays and genres
TOPIC 2 LANGUAGE – NOUNS AND NOUN GROUPS
- The meanings and structure of nouns
- Common nouns
- Nominalisation
- The noun group
- The function of different types of nouns
- The importance of noun groups in academic writing
TOPIC 3 LANGUAGE – VERB GROUPS AND THE CLAUSE
- Verbs
- The meaning/semantics of verbs
- Function of verbs in academic writing
- The structure of the verb group
- Tense in the verb group
- Voice in the verb group
- Polarity in the verb group
- Modality in the verb group
- The clause
TOPIC 4 MIDDLE GROUND – PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE
- The sentence
- The paragraph
- The topic sentence
- Supporting sentences
- Theme and Rheme
- Choosing themes
- Rheme
- Thematic development
TOPIC 5 MIDDLE GROUND – COHESION
- Cohesion
- Conjunction
- Reference
- Presuming participants
- Common reference mistakes
- Reference nouns
TOPIC 6 MIDDLE GROUND – USING EVIDENCE AND PARAPHRASING
- The function of the supporting sentence
- The topic sentence and the essay preview
- Evidence in supporting sentences
- Referring to the literature
- Paraphrasing and summarising
- Strategies for paraphrasing
- Strategies for summarising
TOPIC 7 THE BIG PICTURE – CITATION AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Citations
- Bibliography and reference list
TOPIC 8 THE BIG PICTURE – ESSAY QUESTIONS AND OUTLINES
- Interpreting the essay question
- Developing the essay outline
- Abstract essay outlines
TOPIC 9 THE BIG PICTURE – INFORMATION REPORTS
- Information reports
- Descriptive information reports
- Taxonomic information reports
TOPIC 10 THE BIG PICTURE – EXPLANATIONS
- Explanations
- Sequential explanations – how things happen
- Taxonomic information reports – why things happen
- The language of cause and effect
TOPIC 11 THE BIG PICTURE – EXPOSITIONS
- Expositions
- Integrating other text-types into expositions
- The language of Expositions
- Spoken versus written language
- Using language to evaluate
- Modality
- Graduation
- Engagement
- Heteroglossia
TOPIC 12 THE BIG PICTURE – DISCUSSIONS
- Discussions
- Organising the arguments
- The language of Discussions
ANSWERS
REFERENCES
Year Level | Year 10, Year 11, Year 12 |
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Date of Publication | 2012 |
ISBN | 9781921586613 |