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