This document provides advice on various aspects of academic writing for university courses. It covers general tips, such as starting early, having a clear argument, and revising extensively. It also discusses planning and organizing essays, including using thesis statements, introductions, conclusions, and paragraphs. Additional sections provide guidance on reading and research, using sources, specific writing types, style and editing, and resources for English as a second language students. The document aims to help students improve their academic writing skills.

1. I.S.F.D. Nº 41
Profesorado de Inglés
Language and Written Expression IV
Advice on Academic Writing.
University of Toronto.
Writing course.
Teacher: Stella Maris Saubidet Oyhamburu.
Student: Florencia Franco
DEADLINE: May 25th

2. INDEX
1- General.
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2-Planning and Organizing.
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3-Reading and Researching.
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4-Using Sources.
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5- Specific Types of Writing.
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3. GENERAL
》Some General Advice on Academic Essay-Writing
Successful methods of composing.
- Start writing early
- It should have an argument
- Formulate as exactly as possible the question(s) you will seek to answer
- Organize your ideas before writing
- Write what seems readiest to be written
- Keep the essay’s overall purpose and organization in mind
- Revise extensively; revise sentences, with special attention to transitions)
- Unlearn school rules rely on these will limit your freedom to develop more
sophisticated arguments and a more mature style.

4. 》Understanding Essay Topics
(develop and display your powers of reasoning)
> Key terms (Analyse; Compare; Evaluate; Argue (or agree or disagree)
> Concepts and ways of thinking; it encourages you to break new ground for
yourself in applying course methodology.
> Look for controversies will also help you find things worth discussing.
> Formulate a tentative thesis statement will help focus your investigation.
》Writer’s Block
> Make notes on key ideas or potential pieces of evidence. Try a mind-mapping
exercise.
> Get your ideas down simply and clearly. Leave plenty of time for revising and editing.
> Write the introduction last, you will have a better sense of exactly what you need to
introduce.
> Try time-management strategies.
> Take a break. If you are exhausted, you’re unlikely to be productive.

5. PLANNING AND ORGANIZING
The best time to think about how to organize your paper is during the pre-writing stage.
Knowing the patterns of reasoning associated with a genre can help you to structure your
essay.
you will have to do some reading and weighing of evidence before you start to plan.
# Use Thesis Statements
1. It makes a definite and limited assertion that needs to be explained and
supported by further discussion
2. It shows the emphasis and indicates the methodology of your argument.
3. It shows awareness of difficulties and disagreements.

6. # Introductions and Conclusions
- A good introduction should identify your topic, provide essential context, and indicate
your particular focus in the essay.
Consider these strategies for capturing your readers’ attention and for fleshing out your
introduction.
- A strong conclusion will provide a sense of closure to the essay while again placing your
concepts in a somewhat wider context.
(move beyond merely summarizing the key points of your essay)
# Paragraphs
A paragraph is a sentence or a series of related sentences developing a central idea,
called the topic. Paragraphs add one idea at a time to your broader argument.
Definition / Analysis / Classification Illustration
A topic sentence states the main point of a paragraph: it serves as a mini-thesis for
the paragraph.

7. READING AND RESEARCHING
Critical Reading Towards Critical Writing
Critical writing depends on critical reading. he
judgments and interpretations you make of the texts
you read are the first steps towards formulating your
own approach.
1. First determine central claims or purpose of
the text.
2. context.
3. Distinguish the kinds of reasoning
4. Examine the evidence the text employs.
5. Critical reading may involve evaluation.
Taking Notes from Research
Reading
1. Know what kind of ideas you
need to record
2. Don’t write down too much
3. Label your notes intelligently

8. Dealing with New Words
You don’t need to interrupt your reading to look up
every hard word right away in the dictionary. Mark
unfamiliar words, but try these tactics for making an
“educated guess” at the meaning as you go.
1. SOUND.
2. STRUCTURE
3. CONTEXT
4. DICTIONARY
5. WRITING
6. REINFORCEMENT
Further Resources for Building Vocabulary Skills
The best way to increase and deepen your general
vocabulary is to spend time reading.
Previewing
Skimming and Scanning
Summarizing

9. USING SOURCES
#Do not plagiarize:
You need to keep mentioning
authors and pages and dates to
show how your ideas are related to
those of the experts.
#Standard Documentation
Formats
#Traditional Endnotes
#MLA System
#APA System:
#Numbered Note Systems
#Electronic Sources

10. #Using Quotations
# Using Quatations
Quotations come from somewhere, and your reader will want to know
where. Don’t just parachute quotations into your essay without providing at
least some indication of who your source is. (punctuation, block
quotation, ellipsis, square brackets).
#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.
Along with quotation, paraphrase and summary provide the main tools for
integrating your sources into your papers.

11. SPECIFIC TYPES OF WRITING
→ The Book Review or Article Critique. → How to use Active
voice in the Sciences.
→ Writing an Annotated Bibliographý. → Effective Admission
Letters.
→ The Literature review: A few tips on conducting it. → Application Letters and Résumés.
→ The Abstract. →
The Academic Proposal.
→ The Comparative Essay. → Academic
Proposals in Graduate school.
→ Writing about History. → The Lab
Report.

12. STYLE AND EDITING (REVISING)
→Revising and Editing. →Fixing comma
splices.
→Hit Parade of errors in Grammar, Punctuation and Style. →Passive voice: When to use it and when to avoid it.
→Fixing dangling modifiers. →Sentence
fragments.
→Wordiness: Danger signals and ways to react. →Some tools and rules to improve your
spelling.
→Unbiased language. →Plurals.
→Punctuation.
→Possessives.
Revising gives you the chance to preview your work on behalf of the eventual
reader. Good revision and editing can transform a mediocre first draft into an
excellent final paper.

13. Revision may mean changing the shape
and reasoning in your paper.
1. Intention of the assignment.
2. Organization (introduction, section,
connections, conclusion)
3. Now polish and edit your style.
A Note on Appearance:
▪ Include a cover page - Put the reference list
▪ Number your pages - Staple your pages
▪ Double-space your text - Use a standard font.
▪ Leave margins.
Hit Parade Of Errors In Grammar, Punctuation, and Style
Markers look at four general areas in deciding on a mark for a written assignment:
▪ how well you’ve handled the topic and followed the assignment
▪ the quality of your ideas
▪ the way you’ve organized your paper
▪ the quality of your writing style and grammar.

14. 1 Faulty Agreement 9. Mixed or Dead Metaphors
2. Sentence Fragments 10. Faulty Word Choice
3. Run-on Sentences 11. Wordiness
4. Overuse of Passive 12. Comma Splices
5. Faulty Parallelism. 13. Misuse of
Comma/Semicolon/Colon.
6. Vague Pronouns 14. Incorrect Comparison
7. Dangling Modifiers 15. Double Constructions
8. Squinting or Misplaced Modifiers
Wordiness: Danger Signals and Ways to
React
Doubling of Words Passive Verbs
Intensifiers, Qualifiers Padded Verbs
Formulaic Phrases Unnecessary “to be”
and “being”

15. Unbiased Language
The “Man” Trap
Confusing the Group and the
Individual:
Gendered Labels
Punctuation
Punctuation, when skillfully deployed,
provides you with considerable control
over meaning and tone.
Commas
Semicolons
Colons.
Dashes
Parentheses
Fixing Comma Splices
A comma splice occurs when you use a comma to join
two complete sentences without placing an appropriate
joining word between them. The comma just isn’t strong
enough to do the job of making 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
and to avoid awkwardness. Consider the sentence,

16. Passive Voice
In an active sentence, the person or thing
responsible for the action in the sentence
comes first. In a passive sentence, the person
or thing acted on comes first, and the actor is
added at the end, introduced with the
preposition “by.” The passive form of the verb is
signaled by a form of “to be”
Fixing 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. Dangling modifiers are easy to miss.
Sentence Fragments
A fragment lacks a main—or independent—
clause. Put more informally, a sentence
fragment doesn’t make a statement that can
stand on its own.
Subject-Verb Agreement
When the subject of a sentence consists of a
complex noun phrase, forming the verb
according to the noun directly in front of it may
be tempting, but it is almost always incorrect. To
ensure that your verb agrees with the subject,
ask yourself which single word in the subject is
truly controlling the verb.
Possessives.
Plurals.
Singular
Regular
Plural

17. T
I
P
S
Some Tools and Rules to Improve Your Spelling
- Use a (good) dictionary.
- Be consistent about using British or American spellings in your
writing.
- Always check certain “troublesome” suffixes in your dictionary.
- Create your own “difficult-to-spell” lists.
- Learn the standard pronunciations for frequently misspelled
words.
- Watch out for homophones, near-homophones, and other easily
confusable words.
- Use your computer spellchecker, but with caution.
- Become familiar with English spelling rules.

18. ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
Using Articles
Articles help clarify the meaning of the noun in your sentence. There are only two articles in the
English language: the and a. A noun may also appear without an article in front of it.
Articles belong in front of all other modifiers preceding a noun. There are other special modifiers
called determiners or markers that may appear in front of a noun phrase.
You can determine which article to place in front of almost any noun by considering concepts
such as countable, uncountable, singular, plural, definite, indefinite.
Special Uses of Articles
1. Media and communications 4. Place/object of activity
nouns
2. Means of transportation 5. Directions

19. Expressions of Quantity:
Special Cases of Subject-Verb Agreement
With fractions, percentages and indefinite quantifiers the verb agrees with the
preceding noun or clause.
The words majority and minority are used in a variety of ways
Expressions of time, money and distance usually take a singular verb.
Adjectives preceded by the and used as plural nouns take a plural verb.
Expressions using the phrase number of depend on the meaning of the phrase
Using Gerunds and Infinitives
Following a verb (gerund or
infinitive), a preposition (gerund
only), an indirect object (infinitive
only)
Verbs for Referring to Sources
You can indicate your attitude to the sources you cite
by choosing specific verbs to refer to them. Don’t just
keep repeating “Smith says.” There is a wide choice of
such verbs in English. Use a dictionary to check that
you have chosen a verb with the nuance you intend.

20. FURTHER RESOURCES
The advice files on this site answer the kinds of questions that
University of Toronto students ask about their written assignments.
Most were created by writing instructors here—people who are
familiar with U of T expectations.
Teachers from across the Web are welcome to create links to any
of the Advice pages and to copy our printer-friendly Student PDF
files

21. BIBLIOGRAPHY
● University of Toronto (1996). Writing courses, Advice
on Academic Writing. Last visited; May 25th, 2020.
Available at: https://writing.utoronto.ca/