Lily 2010

 It is the kind of writing used in high school and college classes.  Academic writing is different from creative writing, which is the kind of writing you do when you write stories.  It is also different from personal writing, which is the kind of writing you do when you write letters or s to your friends

 Creative writing and personal writing are informal, so you may use slang, abbreviations, and incomplete sentences.  However, academic writing is formal, so you should not use slang or contractions.  Also, you should take care to write complete sentences and to organize them in a certain way.

Fragments  In some languages, you can sometimes leave out the subject in a sentence; in others, you can sometimes leave out the verb. In EFS writing, you must ALWAYS have at least one subject and one verb in every sentence. If you leave out either the subject or the verb, your sentence is incomplete. We call an incomplete sentence a fragment.  Fragments are sentence errors.

1. Is not easy to get an A in Lily’s class. (There is no subject. To correct sentence 1, add a subject: It is not easy to get an A in Lily’s class.) 2. People in Sydney always in a hurry. (There is no verb. To correct sentence 2, add a verb: People in Sydney are always in a hurry. )

 When you are learning to write in a language that is not your own, you must learn to communicate in terms that your new world will understand.  But you probably find it hard to express in a second language the many ideas filling your mind. To release these bottled-up ideas, you must gain an understanding of the grammar and writing techniques of the second language. Only when you have done this will you be able to present yourself to best advantage in academic writing.

 Writing in a second language at first may seem to be much like writing in your first language, but of course it is not. The problem stems from more than a mere difference between words or symbols. It is also a matter of the arrangement of words together in a sentence. The words and word groups of one language do not fit together in the same way as the words of another language do. Perhaps even more important, ideas do not fit together in the same way from language to language.

 A Russian, an Egyptian, a Brazilian, and a Japanese tend to arrange their ideas on the same subject in quite different ways within a paragraph. These differences exist because each culture has its own special way of thinking.  In following a direct line of development, an English paragraph is very different from an Oriental paragraph, which tends to follow a circular line of development. It also differs from a Semitic paragraph, which tends to follow parallel lines of development. A paragraph in Spanish, or in some other Romance languages, differs in still another way: its line of thought is sometimes interrupted by rather complex digressions. (Broken lines indicate largely irrelevant material introduced into a paragraph.)

 In different languages, the various approaches to making a written statement are related to each culture’s culturally influenced patterns of thinking, none of which is necessarily better than any other. An awareness that rhetorical patterns differ from one culture to another can help students to more quickly adopt a writing pattern that is not native to them.

 And how a person thinks largely determines how that person writes. Thus, in order to write well in English, an EFS student should first understand how English speakers usually arrange their ideas. This arrangement of ideas can be called a thought pattern. And even though English thought patterns are not native to you, once you understand them you can more easily imitate them. By doing this, you will succeed in writing more effective English.

 A basic feature of the English paragraph is that it normally follows a straight line of development. This English thought pattern is important for a writer to understand. The paragraph often begins with a statement of its central idea, known as a topic sentence, followed by a series of subdivisions of the central idea. These subdivisions have the purpose of developing the topic sentence, preparing for the addition of other ideas in later paragraphs.

 The typically straight line of development of an English paragraph is the basis of its particular type of coherence. An English paragraph is coherent when its ideas are clearly related to each other in orderly sequence. Each sentence in such a paragraph should naturally grow out of each previous sentence in developing the central idea. Ideally, there should be a sense of movement or flow, a going forward and building on what has been said before.

 Academic writing in English is probably different from academic writing in your native language. The words and grammar and also the way of organizing ideas are probably different from what you are used to.  In fact, the English way of writing may seem clumsy, repetitive, and even impolite to you. Just remember that it is neither better nor worse than other ways; it is just different.

 You may hold your reader’s interest if a paragraph contains an occasional obscure, weak, or repetitious sentence, but too many such paragraphs could cause the reader to give up.  One way to achieve coherence is to arrange a paragraph’s details in a systematic way that is appropriate for the subject matter. For example, many writers of English place their supporting details in order of importance, often starting with the least important detail and ending with the most important one.

Paragraphs are also developed chronologically, spatially, from the general to the specific (deduction), or from the specific to the general (induction).

 Exposition  Information report  Argumentation  Description  Narration

The main strategies of expository writing. 1. Development by Exemplification

2. Development by Process Analysis

3. Development by Comparison and Contrast

4. Development by Definition

5. Development by Classification

6. Development by Causal Analysis (cause and effect)

 This course will help you learn and practice the format, sentence structure, and organization appropriate for academic writing. By the end of week 18, you shall be able to produce 3 types of writing: essay (education - comparison and contrast), information report (obesity – cause and effect) and case study (asylum seekers).  You should be able to pass 2 out of these 3 types of assigned writing tasks to pass your writing unit.