This document provides advice on various aspects of academic writing such as developing an argument, addressing writer's block, critical reading, planning essays, and revising writing. It discusses formulating a thesis, doing research, taking notes, incorporating sources, and avoiding common grammatical errors. The document also outlines different types of academic assignments and offers additional resources for academic writing support.

1. Advice on
academic writing
Zaloa E.

2. General advice:
 An essay should have an argument. It should answer a
question or a few related questions.
 It should try to prove something –develop a single thesis
or a short set of closely related points- by reasoning and
evidence.
 Formulate the questions you will seek to answer in your
essay.
 Next, develop a provisional thesis or hypothesis.
 An essay´s organization should be designed to present
your argument clearly and persuasively.

3. Writer´s block
 Writers block refers to those greater than ordinary
blockages. It occurs when a writer feels truly stuck and
unable to write. It can be caused by anxiety, stress, or a
simple lack of understanding.
 Have you done enough research? If you don´t know what to
write about, you may need to do more research or review
the research you have already done.
 Talk about your ideas with a friend or a another student in
the class.
 Try a mind-mapping exercise.
 Try a free-writing exercise. Do not worry about spelling,
grammar, or punctuation. Instead, look for any important
or recurring ideas.
 Leave plenty of time for revising and editing

4. Critical reading
 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 of this subject, you
will need to do careful critical reading of sources and to
use them critically to make your own argument.
 To read critically is to make judgments about how a text
is argued. This is a highly reflective skill requiring you
to "stand back" and gain some distance from the text
you are reading.

5. Essay topic
 Note key terms that define the kind of reasoning you
should be using: analyze, compare, evaluate, argue.
 Note which concepts or methods the topics asks you to
use (e.g. arguing a point with others or exploring your
own responses)
 Ask yourself questions and look for controversies in the
material that will help you find things worth discussing.
 Formulate a tentative thesis statement at a fairly early
stage. It will help focus your investigation.

6. How do I read looking for ways of
thinking?
 Determine the central claims or purpose of the text
(its thesis)
 make some judgments about context . What audience
is the text written for? Who is it in dialogue with?
 Distinguish the kinds of reasoning the text employs.

7. Planning and organizing
 When you begin planning, bear in mind the type of
essay you are writing. Knowing the patterns of
reasoning associated with a genre can help you to
structure your essay.
Thesis statement
 A clear statement of your position. Typically, this
summary statement comes in the first paragraph of the
essay, though there is no rigid rule about position.

8. Introductions and conclusions
 A good introduction should identify your topic, provide
essential context, and indicate your particular focus in
the essay. It also needs to engage your readers' interest.
 A strong conclusion will provide a sense of closure to the
essay while again placing your concepts in a somewhat
wider context. It will also, in some instances, add a
stimulus to further thought.

9. Paragraphs
 A paragraph is a series of related sentences developing
a central idea, called the topic. Try to think about
paragraphs in terms of thematic unity: a paragraph is a
sentence or a group of sentences that supports one
central, unified idea. Paragraphs add one idea at a time
to your broader argument.
 Probably the most effective way to achieve paragraph
unity is to express the central idea of the paragraph in
a topic sentence.
 Topic sentences are similar to mini thesis statements

10. Taking notes from Research
Reading
 If you take notes efficiently, you can read with more
understanding and also save time and frustration when you
come to write your paper.
 Know what kind of ideas you need to record: read with a
purpose in mind, and you will be able to sort out relevant
ideas.
 Don´t write too much: Your essay must be an expression of
your own thinking, not a patchwork of borrowed ideas. Plan
to invest your research time in understanding your sources
and integrating them into your own thinking.
 Label your notes intelligently: Whether you use cards or
pages for note-taking, take notes in a way that allows for
later use.

11. Research using the Internet
 The Net is a tremendous resource, but it must be used
carefully and critically.
 There are a great many solid academic resources
available on the Net, including hundreds of on-line
journals and sites set up by universities and scholarly or
scientific organizations.
 Don't rely exclusively on Net resources. Cross-
checking information from the Net against information
from the Library is a good way to make sure that the
Net material is reliable and authoritative.

12. Previewing
 When reading for academic purposes, it is preferable to
read with certain goals in mind.
Skimming and Scanning
 To get a general overview of the text before beginning
to read it in detail. By first skimming a text, you can
get a sense of its overall logical progression.
 Scanning 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’re researching.

13. Summarizing
 Summarizing a text, or distilling its essential concepts
into a paragraph or two, is a useful study tool as well as
good writing practice. A summary has two aims: (1) to
reproduce the overarching ideas in a text, identifying
the general concepts that run through the entire piece,
and (2) to express these overarching ideas using precise,
specific language.
 make decisions about which concepts to leave in and
which to omit, taking into consideration your purposes
in summarizing and also your view of what is important
in this text.

14. Using sources
 The purpose of any paper is to show your own thinking
 In academic papers, you need to keep mentioning
authors and pages and dates to show how your ideas are
related to those of the experts
 Don't paste passages from online sources into your draft
As you read any text summarize useful points in your
own words.
 Quotations, paraphrases, or summaries: If you use the
author's exact words, enclose them in quotation marks,
or indent passages of more than four lines.

15. Paraphrase
 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.
 To paraphrase you must provide a reference.
 It must be in your own words. You must do more than
merely substitute phrases here and there. You must also
create your own sentence structures.

16. Specific types of writing
To write about something always consider the topic and genre as well as its
particular characteristics . Such as:
 The book review or article critique.
 Annotated bibliography.
 Literature review.
 The academic proposal.
 The abstract.
 The comparative essay.
 Writing about history.
 Writing about literature.
 Writing about science.
 Admission letters.
 Application letters and résumes.
 The lab report.

17. Revising and editing
 Revising gives you the chance to preview your work on
behalf of the eventual reader.
 Revision may mean changing the shape and reasoning in
your paper. It often means adding or deleting sentences
and paragraphs, shifting them around, and reshaping
them as you go.
 Polishing and editing your style by moving to smaller
matters such as word choice, sentence structure,
grammar, punctuation, and spelling. You may already
have passages that you know need further work. This is
where you can use computer programs (with care) and
reference material such as handbooks and handouts.

18. Appearance:
 Include a cover page giving the title of your paper, the
name of the course, your name, the date, and the
instructor's name. Don't bother with coloured paper,
fancy print, or decorations.
 Number your pages
 Double-space your text, including indented quotations,
footnotes, and reference lists. Leave margins of one
inch (2.5 cm) on all sides of the page.
 Put the reference list or bibliography on a separate
page at the end.

19. Wordiness
 One of the most efficient ways to improve your writing
is to edit it for conciseness.
 Recognize unnecessary words and edit them out.
Unbiased Language
 Recent changes in social awareness have made people
think about the ways language tends to downgrade
certain groups. Common sense and some specific
strategies can help you avoid suggesting putdowns
where you don't intend them.

20. Punctuation
 Learning to punctuate is about much more than rules.
Punctuation, when skillfully deployed, provides you with
considerable control over meaning and tone. Try to
experiment with all forms of punctuation in order to
expand your expressive range as a writer.
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
and to avoid awkwardness.

21. Dangling modifiers
 The term dangling modifier refers to a word or phrase,
usually at the start of a sentence, that does not connect
properly to the rest of the sentence.
Spelling
 Improve your spelling by using some techniques like
using a good dictionary, checking certain "troublesome"
suffixes in your dictionary, Create your own "difficult-
to-spell" lists.
 Be consistent about using British or American spellings
in your writing.

22. Subject verb agreement
 Making sure your verbs agree with your subjects is not just
a question of grammatical correctness; it is a question of
clarity. But to be clear, you will need to get the grammar
right.
Using articles
 Articles are special modifiers that appear before nouns or
noun phrases. Like other adjectives, they help clarify the
meaning of the noun in your sentence. There are only two
articles in the English language: the and a (and its
variant an, used before a word that starts with a vowel
sound)

23. Three common types of
college writing assignments
 THE CLOSED WRITING ASSIGNMENTS: these kind of
writing assignments present you with two counter
claims and ask you to determine from your own analysis
the more valid claim. They resemble yes-no questions.
These topics define the claim for you, so the major task
is working out the support of the claim.
 THE SEMI-OPEN WRITING ASSIGNMENTS: they do not
offer up claims. Determining your own claim represents
the biggests challenge for these type of assignments.
 THE OPEN WRITING ASSIGNMENT: they require you to
decide both your writing topic and your claim (or
thesis). You decide what to write about. The biggest
decision becomes selecting your topic and limiting it to
a manageable size.

24. Further resources
 Comprehensive: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
 Writing in the Disciplines:
http://www.tru.ca/disciplines/
 Literary Writing: http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/
 Style: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/
 Grammar Review:
http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hyper
grammar/grammar.html
 English as a Second Language: http://a4esl.org/
 Punctuation:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1
9900017394_1990017394.pdf

25. Bibliography
 Writing at the University of Toronto. (n.d.).
Retrieved April 19, 2016, from
http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/
 L. Lennie Irvin, 2010. “What is Academic Writing?”