What makes good academic writing?

Essay writing Problem 1 – an essay assignment evaluates how well students can produce a particular piece of writing. In the real world this writing experience will never happen again. Instead writing will: inform a colleague or client; persuade a court, foundation or business; humour a friend or enemy; challenge a community or government. Writing seems artificial in this context – writing for academic assessment. Its purpose can create self-conscious, awkward and inefficient performance. We want to avoid this. So why do we ask you to write essays, if there are limitations? An essay asks you to provide an opinion, evaluate evidence, comment on issues, make a point, be persuasive and communicate to an audience – all real life skills encountered in some way in the list above. Remember this.

Who are you writing for? “I’m writing for a teacher who is an unreasonable reader. He reads for form and not communication, for error instead of substance. You say this is unclear? My flatmate would understand. You say you don’t see the point of this paragraph? My Politics professor would.” Does this sound like you?

Traditional feedback centres on detection of error and observations on content. Problems: - you won’t write the same essay twice - you won’t have the opportunity to “clarify this section” or “expand that section with further detail”. Why do these comments come up in the first place?

Many students believe that: 1) there exists in the teacher’s mind the paradigm of a Perfect Paper and 2) the closer the student gets to duplicating the model of perfection the higher the assessment mark will be.

To move away from writing in this way and to avoid feedback of an unhelpful kind as much as possible, we need to start thinking about how a reader reads. If you can understand how the readers of your prose will most likely go about the act of reading it, then you can make use of these insights to improve future writing tasks.

My job is to help you 1) to understand the complex relationship between thought and the expression of thought, and 2) to understand – and to some extent control – how readers read.

Write NO MORE THAN 1 SENTENCE to answer the question: How will your professional development be affected by studying academic writing?

On the piece of paper, write your sentence and underline the word or words that express the action of the sentence i.e. the word or words that tell the reader what is happening in the sentence. Copy the same sentence on the second piece of paper – WITHOUT UNDERLINING ANYTHING. Write clearly. Exchange these sentences with the person sitting behind you. Now underline the word or words in the sentence you have just been given that you think express the action of the sentence i.e. the word or words that tell the reader what is happening in the sentence. Now compare the sentence you have just underlined with the writer’s original. Are they the same?

What would be the student reception accorded to the introduction of this new idea about writing? How would the students receive this new idea about writing?

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