The document provides advice on various aspects of academic writing such as planning, organizing, reading, researching, using sources, specific writing types, style and editing. Some key points covered include: - Planning an essay involves formulating a question, developing a thesis, and organizing arguments clearly. - Critical reading involves determining claims, context, evidence and evaluating strengths and weaknesses. Notes should be labeled for later use. - Sources must be properly cited to avoid plagiarism. Quotations should not overcrowd your own ideas. - Different writing types have distinct goals and organizations such as explaining a topic for the public or asking a historical question. - Revising, concise writing, unbiased language, proper punctuation

1. Academic Writing
Essay
Writing advice
ISFD Nº 41
Language and Written Expression IV
Student: Natalia Martinachi
Teacher: Stella Saubidet
Date: May, 2020

2. Index
❖ General……………………………………….3.
❖ Planning and Organizing……………………4-5
❖ Reading and Researching…………………..6-7
❖ Using Sources………………………………..8
❖ Specific Types of Writing……………………9-12
❖ Style and Editing…………………………….13-17
❖ English as a Second Language…………….18-19
❖ Bibliography…………………………………..20

3. General
An essay should have an argument
● It should have a topic
● The writer should formulate the question(s) to be answer in the essay. Then develop provisional thesis or hypothesis.
● Argument may be well presented : clearly and persuasively organized.
● Writer should use successful methods of composing an essay:
➔ Start writing early as a means of exploration and discovery
➔ Write what seems readiest to be written
➔ Keep the essay’s overall purpose and organization in mind
➔ Revise extensively. Attend to the whole essay and draft and redraft
➔ Revise sentences, so that a reader will be able to follow the sequences of ideas

4. Planning advantages:
● To produce a logical and orderly argument
● To produce an economical paper
● To produce a thorough paper
Overplanning risks:
● Doesn’t leave you time to write and revise
● Does not provide enough opportunity to discover
new ideas in the process of writing
Using Thesis Statements
● Every paper requires one
● It must come at the end of the
paragraph
● It must be one sentence in length
● You can not start writing until you have
a perfect thesis statement
● It must give three points of support
Planning and Organizing

5. Introduction and conclusion
● A introduction should identify the
topic, provide essential context and
indicate the focus in the essay
● A conclusion provide a sense of
closure to the essay. It sometimes
add a stimulus to further thought
Paragraph
It is a sentence or group of sentences that
support one central idea
● Express the central idea in a topic
sentence in order to achieve
paragraph unity
Using Topic Sentences
● It states the main point of the paragraph
● It appears at the very beginning of
paragraphs
● Ask yourself what’s going on in your
paragraph
● Relating your topic to your thesis can help

6. Reading and Researching
CRITICAL READING: To make judgments about how a text is argued
● Read looking for ways of thinking about the subject matter:
➔ Determine the central claims or purposes of the text
➔ Make some judgements about context
➔ Examine the evidence the text employs
➔ Involve evaluation by assessing the strengths and weakness of an argument
● Reading tips:
➔ Textbooks: Become aware of the structure of the text. Look at the chapter titles and headings as they name
the concepts. Then read to notice definitions and examples
➔ Primary sources: Read through each literary work or historical document paying attention to your own
responses and questions
➔ Research Readings: Go through sources for a research essay, looking for ways to answer your research
question.

7. ● TAKING NOTES FROM RESEARCH READING: Know what kind of ideas you need to record. Don’t write down
too much. Label your notes in a way that allows for later use
● DEALING WITH NEW WORDS: Don’t interrupt your reading to look up every word, it is actually better to guess first.
After you have learnt it, make new words part of your active vocabulary to keep them in context
● PREVIEWING: Read with certain goals in mind in order to focus on the proper elements of the reading..
● SKIMMING: Read to get a general overview of the text before reading in detail, in order to get a sense of its overall
logical progression
● SCANNING: it is basically skimming with a more tightly focused purpose: skimming to locate a particular fact or
figure, or to see whether this text mentions a subject you are researching
● SUMMARIZING: Useful study tool as well as good writing practise. It has two aims: to identify the general
concepts and to express them using precise, specific language.

8. Using Sources
PLAGIARISM: It is against the rules to copy from your friends’ homework and to borrow passages from
books or articles without identifying them.
STANDARD DOCUMENTATION FORMATS: Different disciplines use their own systems to give
information about sources.
USING QUOTATIONS: Don’t include too much quotation in your essay, you will crowd out your ideas.
The focus of your essay should be on your own understanding of the topic.
PARAPHRASE AND SUMMARY: To paraphrase means to restate someone else’s ideas in your own
language at roughly the same level of detail. To summarize means to reduce the most essential points
of someone else’s work into a shorter form. They provide the main tools for integrating sources into
your papers.

9. Specific Type of Writing
Writing for the Public:
● Includes a variety of genres, which
share common features.
● The writer should know the audience,
provide context, be concrete, and do
research if necessary.
Writing about Literature: Tips
● Avoid plot summary
● Master the art of the analytical thesis
● Do not confuse the author with the
speaker
● Integrate quotations fully into your
argument
Writing about History
Your goal is to choose a topic and write a paper that:
● Asks a good historical question
● Tells how its interpretation connect to previous work
by others
● Offers a well organized and persuasive thesis on its
own
Writing a philosophy essay
You should aim to do the
following:
● Understand philosophical
questions, concepts,
arguments and theories.
● Think critically
● Develop your own
answers
Writing in the Sciences
It should be written in a
clear and concise style.
Its paragraphs should be
coherent and its ideas
should be well organized

10. ● How to Use Active Voice in the Sciences
➔ Science journals are returning to a preference for the active voice. However, if there is a good reason for
using the passive voice, by all means use it.
● Writing an Effective Admissions Letter:
Qualities to aim for:
➔ Be focussed
➔ Be coherent
➔ Be interpretative
➔ Be specific
➔ Be personal
Options for Organizing an Admission
Letter:
● Narrative: Organize in chronological
order
● Analytic: Give an overall answer about
yourself and then discuss your interest
in your discipline
● Technical: Show your involvement with
a specific issue
ADMISSION LETTERS:

11. ● Application Letters and Résumés: Some practical tips
➔ Specific points about application letters:
1. Write a letter for each application
2. Use standard letter format with internal addresses and salutations
3. It should be one or two pages or screens in length
4. Start strong and clear
5. Use paragraph structure
6. End strongly by requesting an interview
➔ Specific points about résumés
1. Emphasize different aspects of your qualifications or aims
2. Make them easy to read by using headings, point form and white spaces
3. Get some benefits from the traditional chronological organization and the functional one, by creating one - or two- line
introductory section
4. List facts in reverse chronological order, with the most recent ones first.

12. ● The Academic Proposal
➔ It is the first step in producing a thesis
➔ It is expected to contain these
elements:
1. A rationale for the choice of topic
2. A review of existing published work
3. An outline of your intended approach
● Thesis and Grant Proposals: Some
advice
➔ Process
1. Look at the specifications
2. Ask other graduate students
3. Try out your ideas as widely as possible
➔ Function
1. Show why your research idea is interesting
2. Limit your promises
➔ Rhetoric
1. Give enough detail to establish feasibility
2. Show confidence and eagerness

13. Style and Editing
● Revising and editing
➔ Revising gives you the chance to preview your work. Good revision and editing can transform a
mediocre first draft into an excellent final paper.
● Using the Computer to Improve your Writing
➔ Computer lets you easily type in text, shift around, and make small changes.
● Wordiness: Danger signals
➔ The most efficient way to improve your writings is to edit for conciseness
● Unbiased Language: Language sometimes deals disrespectfully with certain groups of people as
wordings seem to assume that every individual is male.
➔ Avoid He and She, finding alternatives can be as simple as using plural rather than singular.

14. ● Punctuation:
➔ It provides you with considerable control over meaning and tone.
● Fixing Comma Splices:
➔ It occurs when you use a comma to join two complete sentences without placing an
appropriate joining word between them. The comma isn’t strong enough to make one
grammatical sentence out of two.
● Faulty parallelism:
➔ The clauses or phrases joined by the conjunctions should have similar grammatical structures
to ensure that your reader can follow the logic of your sentence. Look up for faulty parallelism
whenever you use:
a and b a or b a, b or c
a, b and c a, b or c not only a but also b

15. ● Passive Voice: When to Use it and When to Avoid It
➔ The passive voice places the emphasis on your experiment rather than on you.
➔ Too many passive sentences can create confusion since they can be vague about who is responsible for the
action.
● Fixing Dangling Modifiers
➔ It refers to a word or phrase that does not connect properly to the rest of the sentence. It is usually at the start
of a sentence.

16. ● Some Tools and Rules to Improve Your Spelling
➔ Use a good dictionary
➔ Be consistent about using British or American spellings in your writings
➔ Always check certain “troublesome” suffixes in your dictionary
➔ Create your own “difficult-to-spell” list
➔ Learn the standard pronunciations for frequently misspelled words
● Plurals
➔ There are different plural rules: Regular, Irregular and some special cases.
Possessives
➔ A noun can be made possessive when it could also have of a or of the preceding it. There are: Singular
nouns, Plural nouns and Possessive pronouns

17. ● Subject-Verb Agreement
➔ The two essential parts of a complete sentence are the subject and verb. Subjects can consists of a
single word but they contain several words that, together, form a noun phrase
➔ To ensure that your verb agrees with the subject, ask yourself which single word in the subject is
controlling the verb.
● Sentence Fragments
➔ It lacks a main -or independent- clause. It does not make a statement that can stand on its own.
There are two types of fragments:
1. The first one does not make a statement. It is all subject, no predicate.
2. The second type has a subject and a predicate, but the sentence still can not stand on its own.

18. English as a Second Language
● Using Articles
➔ They are special modifiers that appear before nouns and noun phrases. There are only two articles:
the and a (and its variant an used before a word that starts with a vowel sound)
➔ You can determine which article to place in front of almost any noun by taking into account if it follows a
countable or uncountable noun, a singular or plural, definite or indefinite.
● Special Cases in The Use of the Definite Article
➔ To decide if you should use the word the, ask yourself these three questions:
1. Is the noun indefinite (unspecified) or definite (specific)?
2. Is the noun modified?
3. Is the noun generic?

19. ● Expressions of Quantity: Special Cases of Subject-Verb Agreement: A few rules that are useful for academic
writing:
1. With fractions, percentages and indefinite quantifiers (all, few, much, some), the verb agrees with the preceding
noun or clause
2. The words majority and minority are used in a variety of ways
3. Expressions of time, money and distance usually take a singular verb
4. Adjectives preceded by the and used as plurals nouns take a plural verb
5. Expressions using the phrase number of depend on the meaning of the phrase
● Using Gerunds and Infinitives: Verb forms that can take the place of a noun in a sentence
➔ Some verbs are followed by a pronoun or noun referring to a person, and then an infinitive. Gerunds cannot be
used in this position
➔ Gerund can follow a preposition
➔ Both can replace a noun as the object of a verb
● Verbs for Referring to Sources
➔ You can indicate your attitude to the sources you cite by choosing specific verbs to refer to them.

20. Prof. C. A. Silber, Department of English. “Some general advice on Academic Writing
Essay”. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto. Website:
https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca.