Academic Writing: Core Concepts and Essential Skills

This session discusses the components of the process of writing and poses a set of questions to consider when discovering your personal preferences, strengths, and weaknesses on this journey. Knowing the steps, understanding yourself, and developing strategies to overcome the rough bits will impact your success as a writer. Do not miss the handout with some practical tips!

In this session, you will find out what job interviews and essay formatting have in common and just how much it all matters.

In this section, our focus will turn to the criteria that can guide you to the perfect research question – the very foundation of any good paper.

This session addresses the art of "solid" academic reading that does not only benefit from the content of the text but also intentionally learns from its form.

The eighth session in this series highlights a crucial distinction in the process of research and provides a set of examples of how to make sure you know your primary source from your secondary sources.

When writing in academia, you will always need to lean on a number of secondary sources. How do you know which ones to trust? This session introduces a list of criteria to consider when assessing a source. The handout provides a list of the criteria with an option to take notes of what each of them stands for, and adds an additional tip to the pile.

Once you have identified a set of solid sources that you can build your own research on, you need to decide how to make use of them in your text. This session addresses the whys and the hows of integrating other authors' voices in your text. To dig deeper, you can access the handout with the original text about Hamlet, and all the examples used in the video. Take a close look at how the original has been modified for each version. The second page of the handout provides two frequently occurring mistakes and explanations of what went wrong.

This session focuses on how adding references to your paper is a matter of both honesty and quality of research. Why cite and when? The video comes with a number of good tips for that part of academic writing.

As a introduction to the wonderful world of structuring your writing, this session gives you a useful model to use for your book, chapter, paper, or even the paragraph.

Having good ideas is not enough - in academic writing, you also need to master the skill of presenting these ideas in the best possible way both at the level of general logic of argument and the language you use to communicate this logic. Take a look at a really basic and a more advanced example of how to work with coherence and cohesion. To analyse an even more complex case of editing, turn to the handout accompanying Lecture 14: Hedging.

Would you like to know how to make sure your language is appropriate for the context of academic writing? Here are some tips and examples. To analyse an even more complex case of editing, turn to the handout accompanying Lecture 14: Hedging.

This session takes a closer look at the phenomenon of simultaneously improving both the precision and vagueness of a statement in your paper. Mastering this skill will make your text flexible and less vulnerable to different possible challenges. Do take a good look at the handout that provides a commented edit of a student paragraph, illustrating how to work on your coherence, cohesion, register, and hedging when polishing your text.