This document provides advice on various aspects of academic writing. It discusses including an argument and thesis in essays, using proper organization and structure. Successful writing involves starting early, keeping overall purpose and organization in mind, extensive revision and sentence-level editing, and proofreading. The transition from high school to university writing involves moving from set formulas to developing individual structures and focusing on critical thinking over knowledge demonstration. Other topics covered include dealing with writer's block, outlining and planning essays, writing introductions and conclusions, using topic sentences, critical reading and source use, vocabulary building, research techniques, summarization, documentation formats, and revising and editing.

1. Advice on Academic Writing
Gonzalez, C- ISFD41
University of Toronto

2. Some General Advice on Academic
Essay-Writing
 An essay should have an argument.

 It should contain a provisional thesis.

 An essay should have an organization.




3. Sucessful method of composing an
essay

Good writers start writing early.
●
They keep the essay's overall purpose and organization in
mind.
●
They revise extensively and edit their sentences one by one.
●
Lastly, they proofread the final copy.
●
●
●
●


4. The Transition from High School to
University Writing
High School… University…
• Provides formulas.
• Offers you a ready-made structure
to work with.
• Teaches just one model for an
essay that you then apply in all of
your courses.
• Encourages repetition.
• Provides rules.
• Rewards you for demonstrating your
knowledge of the material.
• Discourages formulas.
• Provides freedom for you to come
up with your own way of
structuring your argument.
• Offers discipline-specific guidelines
for approaching written work
• Discourages repetition.
• Encourages critical thinking.
• Rewards you for engaging in
analysis.

5. Writer’s block
●
Most successful writing proceeds in fits and starts.
●
Writer’s block occurs when a writer feels truly stuck and
unable to write.
●
There are many possible causes, including anxiety,
stress, or a simple lack of understanding of the
material.

6. Organizing and Planning an Essay
 Organize your paper during the pre-writing stage.
 The earlier you begin planning, the better.
 You must be ready to come up with whatever essay stucture.


7. Planning
 Planning provides the following advantages:
• Helps you to produce a logical and orderly argument.
• Helps you to spot repetition
• Helps you to notice if you have left anything out
• Makes drafting the paper easier by allowing you to concentrate on writing
issues such as grammar, word choice, and clarity

8. Introductions and Conclusions

Play a special role in the academic essay.
●
Demand much of your attention as a writer.
●
Provide essential context
●
Indicate your particular focus in the essay.
●
A good introduction should identify your topic
●
A strong conclusion will provide a sense of closure to the
essay while again placing your concepts in a somewhat
wider context.
●

9. Paragraphs
 Support and express one central, unified idea.
 Develop your topic sentence through an ordered, logical
progression of ideas.

10. Topic sentences

State the main point of a paragraph

Protect your readers from confusion by guiding them through
the argument

Appear at the very beginning of paragraphs
●

11. Critical Reading Towards Critical Writing
•
Critical writing depends on critical reading.
●
Most of the papers you write will involve reflection on written
texts.
●
In order to write your own analysis, you will need to do careful
critical reading of sources and to use them critically to make
your own argument.

12. Dealing with New Words
• You don’t need to interrupt your reading to look up every hard
word right away in the dictionary.
●
Guess the meaning of the word first.
●
The context will help you.
●
Then, confirm your guesses with a dictionary

13. How Do I Read Looking for Ways
of Thinking?
•

Determine the central claims or purpose of the text
●
Make some judgements about context.
●
Distinguish the kinds of reasoning the text employs
●
Examine the evidence the text employs.

14. Research Using the Internet
 More and more students are turning to the Internet when doing
research for their assignments
●
Research on the Net is very different from traditional library
research
●
It must be used carefully and critically.
●
On the Internet anyone can put anything they want on a Web
site.
●
There is no review or screening process.

15. Skimming and Scanning
Techniques for skimming a text Scanning
• Read carefully the introductory
paragraph and find the fovus of the
text
• Read carefully the first one of each
paragraph, as well as the concluding
sentence
• Read carefully the concluding paragraph
• Scanning is basically skimming with a
more tightly focused purpose:
skimming to locate a particular fact or
figure
• Keep a specific set of goals in mind as
you scan the text.

16. Summarizing
 It has two aims
• To reproduce the overarching ideas in a text, identifying the
general concepts that run through the entire piece.
• To express these overarching ideas using precise, specific
language.


17. Summarizing Tips
 Include
• The title
• The author
• Author’s thesis,
 Avoid
• Ideas that are not really central to the text.
• Writing opinions or personal responses


18. Standard Documentation Formats

●
Traditional Endnotes or Footnotes with Superscript Numbers
(humanities)
●
MLA System: Parenthetical Author-Page References
(humanities)
●
APA System: Parenthetical Author-Date References (social
sciences)
●
Electronic Sources

19. Revising And Editing
 Good revision and editing can transform a mediocre first draft
into an excellent final paper.

 REVISE
●
Errors In Grammar, Punctuation and Style
●
Unbiased Language
●
Wordiness
●
Spelling
●

20. Types of writtings
 The Book Review or Article Critique

Writing an Annotated Bibliography

The Abstract

The Comparative Essay

Effective Admission Letters

Application Letters

The Academic Proposal

Academic Proposals in Graduate School

The Lab Report

21. Bibliography
 Writing at the University of Toronto. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2016.