The decision to teach a graduate course on academic writing is not one to be taken lightly. Designing a writing course is hard work examples of a annotated bibliography, as it is unlikely that you are already up to date with the relevant literature. In addition, a certain amount of creativity is required to keep your course from becoming boring. Below are 10 specific suggestions that may help you set up a successful and rewarding course on academic writing. Guidelines for Graduate Students Abbott, E.A. (1883). How to write clearly. Rules and exercises on English composition. Boston: Roberts Brothers. Admittedly, some writers produce long sentences and still write clearly. For instance, the novelist Friedrich Dürrenmatt has produced a 123-page murder mystery in a mere 24 sentences (Dürrenmatt, 1988). Those academics who write as well as Dürrenmatt may try to follow in his footsteps. Others do well to use considerably more than 24 sentences for their papers. 2. Use concrete examples. When you start your article with “Resolving competition between two operations invited by a stimulus configuration requires a form of cognitive control essay about college students problems,” you’ll do well to follow this up with something like “For example proofread essays for money, the operations of word reading and color naming come into conflict in the standard Stroop (1935) task, in which naming the color of a written word is slower than naming the color of a neutral stimulus, such as a row of Xs. To resolve the conflict experienced in this paradigm, the powerful tendency to read the word must be overcome in favor of responding to the color dimension.” (Bub, Masson, & Lalonde, 2006, p. 351) 10. Mix things up. To keep your writing course from becoming monotonous lord flies essay topics, you need to vary the pace. In class writing essays services review, use a mix of different activities: have students discuss papers in groups space essays, include a “fun with sentences” section, discuss the writing exercises in the Williams book, and give a lecture on the central topic. Almost every English boy can be taught to write clearly, so far at least as clearness depends upon the arrangement of words. Force, elegance, and variety of style are more difficult to teach thesis statement sample paper, and far more difficult to learn; but clear writing can be reduced to rules. — Rev. Edwin A. Abbott (1883) are exams necessary opinion essay, preface. 6. Add structure through consistent constructions. First example: When you state in the abstract that you will discuss topics A, B the little prince essay, and C, retain this order throughout the entire paper. Second example: When you start a paragraph with the statement “Our first hypothesis was confirmed…”, the reader expects a future paragraph to start with “Our second hypothesis was [not] confirmed…” In general, academic writing is clear when it delivers information in accordance with what the readers expect. Do not set up false expectations. 8. Discuss students’ writing assignments in class. In a “fun with sentences” section, I present the entire class with 5 to 10 educational sentences selected from their previous writing assignments. The selected sentences do not work — it is the job of the class to figure out what is wrong and propose improvements. Students pay keen attention when their sentences may be up for group discussion. Don’t forget to point out that the sentences have been selected because they illustrate a point of general interest. Also, do not reveal the names of the students who authored the defective sentences. Writing the academic paper should be easy. Unlike novelists good review essay topics, academics do not need to worry about character development, description, dialogue, back story, and symbolism. All academics need to worry about is writing clearly — and according to the Reverend Abbott, this merely requires the mechanical application of a set of simple rules. Dürrenmatt, F. (1988). Der Auftrag oder vom Beobachten des Beobachters der Beobachter. Novelle in 24 Sätzen. Zürich, Switzerland: Diogenes Verlag. This perspective on academic writing may sound too good to be true. Graduate students generally struggle for years to overcome their writing problems — can this learning process really be accelerated by the application of a set of simple rules? My experience in teaching graduate students suggests that it can: Academic writing skills can be tremendously improved with only a little instruction. This is hardly surprising when one considers that most students — and, in my experience what is my culture essay, most tenured professors — have learned about academic writing only through trial and error. a method of learning that is often painfully slow and inefficient. 7. Read and discuss empirical research papers in class. Reading is the most fun part of learning how to write. Pass out a set of abstracts and have students discuss the quality of the writing in small groups. Then discuss each abstract at a time, and indicate in concrete terms what is good and what could be improved. For this exercise, I recommend using articles published in Psychological Science. because the writing is generally above par and the research topics are accessible to non–experts.
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