It was great to see so many of you attend the first session of the Academic Language program on Monday.
My session was on academic writing and you identified many interesting 'conundrums' for new academic writers. Some of the points you raised included:
- Academic writing is different to other forms of writing because of its emphasis on referencing
- Academic language is more formal in its tone (although we quickly established that this does not necessarily mean 'more complex'). We explored subjectivity and objectivity in writing.
- The grammar needs to be 'right'.
We spent some time discussing the various genres of academic writing, including essays, annotated bibliographies, practical/scientific reports and technical reports.
Although we recognised that each genre had distinctive qualities, there were some common threads. For example, while essays do not have the formal structure of reports, they do have a structure evident with introductions, conclusions and the way in which paragraphs are structured with topic sentences.
Here is a copy of my presentation (as promised).
I do look forward to seeing many of you tomorrow, when we will look at reports in much more detail.
Thanks to the student who came up to me with a grammar question related to the 'subjective/objective' resource. It should be 'The Internet has meant a lot to my family and me' NOT 'my family and I'!!! My mistake! (I checked this with my colleague John after the session)
Please do post your comments and suggestions to the blog.
All the best
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