Academic Writing
The general approach in this course is analytical and rhetorical: students will be asked to apply their analytical skills to the discourse of their discipline and to explore how effective academic writing is achieved. The tasks and activities will be varied, ranging from small-scale language points to issues of how graduate students can best “position” themselves as junior researchers.The first part of this course will present an overview of the considerations involved in successful academic writing, with a deliberate stress on early exposure to the concept of positioning. We will then examine two overarching patterns in English expository prose: the movement from general to specific and the movement from problem to solution. Discussions of how to handle data, how to write summaries and critiques will follow. Finally, we will deal with constructing a real research paper, that is, one that makes an original contribution to knowledge.