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

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.




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.
●
●
●
●


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.

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.

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.


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

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.
●

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

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
●

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.


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


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

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
●

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

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

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Lee4

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