Thirty-Fifth Lesson

Techniques for working on your writing

Today we discuses about the third key concept of language studies that is called reference.

Reference

Reference is the connected with the ways in which different parts of the text refer to one another. When we are writing we often substitute different words and phrases when we talk about the same subject or topic again. 

This is how we create a sense of reference in the text. One of the more common ways of doing this is to substitute pronouns such as 'she', 'he', 'it' for the person or thing previously mentioned by name. 

Example  

'Pat is coming but she will be late'.

The concept of reference is, in a sense, what makes written texts more interesting. Instead of saying the same things again and again and adding to it, we use many different forms of reference to talk about and extend the topics that have already been mentioned. 

The following is the list of words that are commonly used to make reference to other parts of the text:

Its                                   His                                  Her 

He                                  She                                 They 

Their                              This                                That

Those                             These                                It

     

Thirty-Fourth Lesson

Techniques for working on your writing

Today we discuses about the second key concept of language studies that is called punctuation.

Punctuation

When we speak we can help the listener to understand through the use of gestures, facial expression and body language. We can also use pauses, hesitations and repetitions to add to the force of what we are saying and to make sure that the listener has understood what we are trying to communicate.

When we are writing we have to use different mechanisms to do the same work. This is where punctuation comes in. It allows us to divide up our ideas into manageable chunks so that the reader understands what we are trying to say.

The most commonly used punctuation marks which students have difficulties with are full stop, commas, colons, semicolons, and apostrophes. Last time we discuss only two of them such as full stop and commas and today we discuss remaining punctuation.

Semicolons:

Semicolons have two common uses. First, they are used to separate items in a list after a colon. Second, they can indicate a particular kind of relationship and connection between two parts of a sentence. They are useful to use when the second part of the sentence is still integrally related to the first; in such as case the use of a full stop would appear too final. At the same time, if you use a semicolon you are indicating a more important break within a sentence than you would if you just used a comma. A semicolon can also be used instead of 'and' when you are connecting two parts of sentence.

Colons:

Traditionally, the colon is used within sentence when the second part of the sentence expands upon the first. Another use of the colon is to introduce a list and the items in the list are then separated by semicolons. Colons are used to introduce a separate part of s text such as a short quote.

Apostrophe:

One of the most common confusions that students experience with apostrophes is the distinction between "its" and "it's". This causes a lot of difficulties for the students because the two forms look so similar but actually have completely different meanings. It's is a contraction of 'it is'. Instead pf writing 'it is' in full the 'i' of is omitted and and apostrophe used in its place. Contraction are common in English and replace parts of the verbs 'to be' and 'to have' which have been omitted.        

Thirty-Third Lesson

Techniques for working on your writing

Today we discuses about the second key concept of language studies that is called punctuation.

Punctuation

When we speak we can help the listener to understand through the use of gestures, facial expression and body language. We can also use pauses, hesitations and repetitions to add to the force of what we are saying and to make sure that the listener has understood what we are trying to communicate.

When we are writing we have to use different mechanisms to do the same work. This is where punctuation comes in. It allows us to divide up our ideas into manageable chunks so that the reader understands what we are trying to say.

The most commonly used punctuation marks which students have difficulties with are full stop, commas, colons, semicolons, and apostrophes. Today we discuss only two of them such as full stop and commas.

Full Stop

Full stops signal the end of a sentence. They indicate that the writer has completed one complete thought or idea. A full stop can come at the end of a simple or a complex sentence.

Example:

She did not want to begin the piece of work until she had finished reading her book. 

Commas

Using commas effectively can be quite difficult. Students often feel confused about where to put commas in their writing. One of the reason for this is that conventions for their use very depending on the writer and the context. If you are beginning to write for a new subject you may find it easier if you use shorter sentence to begin with. This can make it easier to order your ideas and therefore to use commas more effectively.

Example:

The strange, distributing, eerie silence was interrupted by a ghostly scream. 

Thirty-Second Lesson

Techniques for working on your writing

We are going to concentrate on examining four key concepts for language studies to help you work on your own writing: cohesion, punctuation, reference and coherence. Note that reference in this context is not the same as reference sources. Today we discuss only one concept that is cohesion. 

Cohesion

Cohesion is concerned with the way in which parts of written texts fit together to make a whole rather than a series of disconnected bits. This is particularly important when you are writing an assignment, and you need to pay attention to the connecting devices that you use. These devices connect the ideas in one sentence to the previous sentence and to the following sentence. 

They also connect the smaller parts of the sentence together, the phrases and clauses. In the same way, they connect paragraphs to each other. The connecting devise help to carry your argument along and lend structure to your writing, so that the reader finds it easier to understand. 

You can think about cohesion in your writing at different levels, in terms of connections between topics; themes; words and phrases, as in the example below regarding connecting words and phrases:

Connecting words and phrases

Then                                                                              Firstly, Secondly

However                                                                        In contrast

Despite                                                                          In addition

Consequently                                                                An example of

Nevertheless                                                                 Similarly

Therefore                                                                      Clearly

Yet                                                                                 But

Although                                                                       And

Because                                                                        As a result

Since

Activity Nineteen: Checking for cohesion  

Take a piece of your own written work. Read the text aloud. Pause at the end of each sentence. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the sentence make complete sense?
• Does it relate to the sentence which went before? How?
• Does it relates to the sentence which follows? How?
• Are too many ideas embedded in one sentence?
• How are the paragraphs related to each other?
• Does each paragraph introduce a new theme?
• How are new ideas introduced?
• Do they relate to the other parts of the text?
• Look out for the connecting devices.  

    

Thirty-First Lesson

Grammar and Punctuation

Until now we have not made a specific point of talking about grammar and punctuation in your written work. In our experience academic staff some-times focus too much on these particular concepts when they are talking about problems with writing, and students themselves often panic about their own feelings of insecurity in this area and lack confidence writing in formal written English style. 

Consequently, we have waited until later in the book to start talking about checking your work for grammatical difficulties and misleading punctuation. We hope that, if you have worked through the book, by this stage you will feel more confident about yourself as a university writer and are less likely to see that the problems you have with writing are primarily connected with grammar and punctuation. 

Although you may think that you do not know about the rules of grammar, everybody who speaks or writes a language intuitively knows the rules of grammar of that language. You may, in fact, speak a number of different languages or dialects in addition to the formal English styles that you are most likely to use for your writing for university. 

In this case, you will be a competent user of a number of different grammars. What you may not know is how to describe the rules of these grammars explicitly, using the specific words that linguists and others use to describe the constituent parts of a sentence. What we hope to do in this section is to draw on your intuitive grammatical knowledge to help you to check your own work.         

Thirtieth Lesson

Editing your work as an outsider

When you are going to edit your work you can look the answers of following list of questions while editing your work. 

• Does the editing in particular, as well as the piece as a whole, answer the question that has been set?

• Is there a sense of a satisfy editing?

• Does the introduction seem helpful as a signpost to the whole piece?

• Can you understand what you written? If not, can you see why? Does the use of subject terminology seem clear and confident? 

• Why is the particular bit of information in the piece? What work is it doing for expressing the ideas of the assignment? 

• Does the whole piece hang together? 

• Do points --- both within and beyond paragraphs --- seem to follow logically?  

• Is there a sense of an argument developing?

• Does the piece of work raise any questions that it does not answer?

• Does the piece of work have a central idea? Is this idea apparent for the reader or do you have to search for it? Is it clear enough for you for restate in a different way?  

Twenty-Ninth Lesson

Reviewing your work: redrafting and editing

We are linking the terms 'redrafting' and 'editing' in this lesson although, in practice, they are usually thought of as rather different activities. It is usually assumed that redrafting take place at an earlier stage than editing and that it may involve a more comprehensive rewrite. 

A first draft could be a piece of non-stop practice writing in which you quickly write as much as you can of your whole assignment. You then write it, and this may involve a lot of change. One way of thinking about the difference between redrafting and editing is that redrafting is usually done by the writer them self when they work towards getting down what they really think they want to say. This may take place through out the writing process, especially if you are using a computer, which make it very easy to redraft as you write. Some professional writers say that they redraft many times before they are satisfied. 

Editing may be seen more as a matter of checking over the organization and style of your work, although you may wish to deal with some content matters at this stage too. It takes place from the perspective of an outsider, even if this outsider is the writer himself. Professional academic writers, offering a paper for ab academic journal, have their work read by several referees on behalf of the editor. These readers count as knowledgeable peers and help determine whether or not the article will be published, if so, what amendments might be useful. 

     

Twenty-Eighth Lesson

Writing the conclusion

The conclusion of a piece of writing is your last opportunity to brings together what you have been saying in a form that will tell your reader, 'Thus is really where all that I have been leading; this is what I want you, the reader, to think at the end of my essay'. 

This final statement must arise out of the piece of writing itself. One piece of advice that writing advisers give is that you don't introduce new information in the conclusion. However, one exception to this is that you might point the way to further work that your piece could lead to.   

We have just suggested that you consider writing your introduction last. Now we are also suggesting that it can be useful to draft your conclusion at an early stage in your writing. This can give you a sense of direction, helping you clearly where you are heading and what you have to do in your easy in order to get your reader to your final point. 

What the conclusion may do

• Refer back to the question posted in the title and show that it has been answered. 

• Give a sense of the ending.

• Point out what the assignment has and has not answered. 

• Show that the writer has done what they proposed to do. 

• Put forward the writer's point of view in the light of the evidence they have presented.

• Allow the writer to be positive about the ideas in the assignment. 

• Point the reader forward to a new related idea.

• Summarize the answers to the questions the assignment set out to address, signalled in the introduction. 

Activity Eighteen: Investigating conclusion

Look for some conclusions in your own work or in any reading you are doing. Check them against the above list. What are these conclusion doing? Do they work well to sum up for the reader the message of the text?  

Twenty-Seventh Lesson

What the introduction may do

• Give an overview of what the piece will be about.

• Present the central idea of the assignment.

• Give reason for writing this piece.

• Explain how the title will be interpreted.

• Give reason for answering a question in a particular way.

• Make a bold statement that the rest of the essay will fill out and justify.

• Convey the writer's own relationship both to the material of the assignment and to the reader, and a sense of their own voice in the assignment.

• Present a concrete example or story which the piece will explain or elaborate upon.  

• Relate the assignment to other work in the same field. 

• Quote from somewhere else in order to interest the reader and give a feel for what the whole essay is about. 

• Give the background of the main topic of the essay; the history and/or the context. 

• Introduce the questions the essay will be dressing. 

Activity Seventeen: Investigating introduction

look at the introduction to two articles in your subject area. Where does each introduction end? What work is it doing? Which of the functions in the above list apply to them?

Twenty-Sixth Lesson

Writing the introduction

In university writing you will be expected to provide some kind of introduction to your assignment. It may seem strange to tackle the introduction at such a late stage. The reason for including here is that in practice yo can only finalize the introduction once you have written the whole assignment and expect for a final review, have got it into the shape that you find acceptable. 

Advise on university writing always stresses the importance of the introduction, and sometime the introduction is prescribed quite specifically. For example, the following is a common formula:

•  Introduction: Tell the reader what you are going to do in the easy.

• Main body: Present your argument

• Conclusion: Say how you have done what you promised in the introduction and bring every thing together.

In practice, there are many different ways of introducing and concluding a piece of work, depending on the subject, the task and the length of your assignment. On the whole, the longer the work the longer the introduction. 

Reader does need to know where the easy will take them, the exact form of introduction will vary according to the particular conventions of the subject as well as any particular requirements of an individual assignment.    

Twenty-Fifth Lesson

From the personal to the academic

On way of thinking about the specificity of academic writing is to compare it with what we can broadly term 'personal' writing, where the writer obviously at its center and there seems to be clear relationship between what is written and writer. 

Then you can think of writing for university as shift from a personal to an academic way of thinking and writing, involving shifts in the writer's sense of 'I' in their writing in specific way.

The following activity is linked to the work you did on the difference between an auto-biographical and an academic text in previous activity, but the focus in different; here we are asking you to consider things from the perspective of yourself, the writer, rather than yourself the reader, and, in particular, to think about your identity and position within your own different kinds of writing.

Activity Seventeen: Writing from a personal perspective

Identify an event in your childhood that was important to you. When you have decided on this, write one or two paragraphs about it. Imagine that you are writing for a friendly fellow student or tutor. 

When you have finished, read over what you have written and not how often you have used 'I'. Can you say from this piece what the 'I' character is liked and what he or she seems to be doing in the account?

Does the 'I' character seem to identify with the child or an adult looking on the child? 

Can you identify features of the writing that show that it is 'personal'?

     

Twenty-Fourth Lesson

Using 'I' in your assignment

Students are often puzzled as to whether they can use the first person in their university assignments. The question is closely related to the large question of your relationship to your material, and your sense of your identity as the writer of the assignment. 

There may be a wide range of reasons for the use of the first person in a piece of writing. For example, you might want to signal that the ideas your are presenting are not definitive. It might be that you want to write about your personal opinion at some points and you want separate this from some other parts of the assignment where you do not use 'I'.

Often writer use 'I' in their introduction to establish their place in relation to their material, and then go on to present the material itself in a more distanced fashion Above all the use of 'I' can establish a sense of relation between writer and reader and between the writer and their material. 

In the following activity we ask you to investigate writers' use-or non-use- of the first person by looking at the some course material.

Activity Sixteen: The use of 'I' in course materials

Check some of the books or course materials you have to hand to see whether they use 'I' and, if so, where they use it and what the reason might be. Think about what effect the use or non-use of 'I' has on the relationship between the reader and writer.     

Twenty-Third Lesson

Using your sources creatively

In this section, we are going to spend some more time thinking about how you might use your different sources in order to integrate the voice of all different authors and writers that you are drawing on when composing your own writing. 

On of the challenges you face as a student writer is finding a way to integrate the source you are drawing on in your own work, and using them effectively to build your own argument without using too many direct quotations from the authors you are using.

A helpful tool in this process of integration is to pay attention to the range of linking words you can use to make a connection in your argument between your ideas and those of the authors you are drawing from. The following activity should help you to do this.   

Activity Fifteen: How you introduce your sources

Look at an example of on of your own assignments. Make a list of some of the words and phrases you have used which signal the shift back and forth between your words and the words of your source author. 

Now take a article you have read or on you need to read for a forthcoming assignment. Use word and phrases the author has used to add to your original list. 

These are some of the ones on our list:

• Discusses
• Points out
• Illustrate
• Claims
• Shows
• Argues
• Provides evidence 
• Says
• Proposes
• Suggests
• Asserts 
• Assumes  

Twenty-Second Lesson

Thinking about plagiarism

In this section we are going to explore some of the more vexing questions around the plagiarism including:

• What is plagiarism?
• How might you plagiarize inadvertently?
• Are there any situations in which you do not have to cite your source?   

When you hand in your assignment the tutor will make the assumption that this is your work. this might seem self-evident and you might even be required to sign a form for verification, particularly if this piece of work is going to count towards your degree. By identifying yourself as the author you are by default laying claim to ownership of that piece of writing. If you don't identify your sources then you lay yourself open to the charge of plagiarism.    

Activity Fourteen: Which of the following would you regard as plagiarism

• Using a direct quote without making the source clear.

• Paraphrasing or Summarising what you have read and not indicating the citation to the original source of your ideas.   

• Cutting from a source document and pasting it into your own work without making citation to the original source.  

• Changing a few words around in the original source and then using it in your work without indicating where the idea came from.

Twenty-First Lesson

Referencing other sources

With the increasing range of sources now being drawn upon by both academics and students in their writing we cannot be definitive hare about how to reference every kind of source that you are likely to be referencing in your work.

As we mentioned already there are a range of online university sites available via the internet which deals extensively with citation and referencing. It is worth spending some time exploring these and next activity should help you to do this.

Activity Thirteen: Learning about citation

Search the internet for relevant websites which give guidance on citation and referencing for university writing. Choose three different websites. On each one follow the relevant links to find out about citing reports. 

Compare the differences and similarities between the advice given on each different site. Now make a record of the key elements that you think should be present when citing reports and in what order they should generally appear. 

When we did this task we found the key elements, which frequently appeared in this order that are mentioned below:

• Author(s) name(s)
• Date
• Title of report
• Name of institution
• Web page
• Volume and numbering  

Twentieth Lesson

Referencing systems

There are two main referencing systems in use in university. One of these uses a number system in the text with notes at the end of the chapter or article; this system often also uses extensive footnoting, and a bibliography is included of works that have been used during the writing of the text. 

The alternative system that we illustrate bellow is called the Harvard system; its use is widespread across many different academic fields of study. In this system, the author's name and the date of publication are given in parentheses in the text and refer to a section at the end of the publication, headed 'references', which in turn contains details of all the published works that have been referenced. The Harvard system look like this:

References

Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and social change. London: Polity Press.

Heath, S.B. (1982) What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and at school, Language in Society, 11(1): 49-76. 

Referencing websites

Although there are still no universal procedures for referencing the web pages, there are some general conventions you need to follow in order to inform anybody reading your work where your ideas came from. You need to provide:

• The name of the website
• The URL
• The date the page was last updated
• The date the website was retrieved  

 Example:

Harasim, L. (2001) Shift happens: online education as a new paradigm in learning, The Internet and Higher Education, 3(1), retrieved 31 July 2002. http://virtualu.cs.sfu.ca/vuweb.newe/papers/harasim_ihe_nov00.pdf.   

Nineteenth Lesson

Making good use of you sources 

Today we look at the different resources that you might be using in your university writing. Whatever course you are studying and whatever the level of study, you are likely to find yourself drawing from a wide range of sources in writing your assignments.  

In this lesson we consider the range of sources that you may be using and how to reference these in your assignments; we then go on to discuss plagiarism and how understand more about using your sources not only helps you to avoid plagiarism but can also help you to develop your own voice in your writing. 

Our first task is designed to help you to consider the range of different sources you might use in writing your assignments. 

Activity Twelve 

Take an example of one or two of your own writing assignments. Now make a list of all the different types of sources you have used in these assignments 

Do you know how to cite these different sources in your assignment writing? 

These are the some of the sources that we have seen students and academics using. How many of these of you listed?

• Books
• Articles
• Book chapters
• Government reports
• Newspaper reports
• Internet sources
• Online journal
• Website of organizations and private individuals
• Blogs
• Lectures 

Eighteenth Lesson

Making an argument by anticipating questions and objections

Our useful way of thinking about argument is in terms of having a conversation with your imagined reader. This conversation might be in terms of a dialogue, for example a series of responses to questions or objections that a reader could make

Activity Eleven:

Now apply this idea to the paragraph below by considering possible questions, objections and counter arguments from an imaginary reader.

Paragraph

An alternative feminist approach suggest that women may stay in violent relationship even when they are not weak. For these women a constituent of being a woman involves being there for their men and being able to maintain a relationship despite obstacles. These women tried to understand their violent partners and felt duty bound to cope the best way they could. For them walking out would have been an admission of failure.


Read the paragraph note down any questions or objections each sentence raises for you as you read and also consider the objections and questions of others that make you clear about your work how being others comment and object on your work.