The Academic Essay DG. Dr Derek Soles

Sample concluding paragraph one

       Sample concluding paragraph two

       Sample concluding paragraph three

       Sample concluding paragraph four

       Sample concluding paragraph five

       Our Case Study continued

       8Using Cohesive Ties between Sentences and Paragraphs

       Using transitional words and phrases

       Using repetition

       Using substitution

       Our Case Study continued

       9Avoiding Errors in Sentence Grammar

       Pronoun case

       Pronoun reference

       Verb tense and mood

       10Avoiding Errors in Sentence Structure

       Sentence fragments

       The run-on sentence

       Misplaced and dangling modifiers

       Faulty parallelism

       Wordiness

       11Writing with Style

       Using subordination

       Effective parallelism

       Using word order effectively

       12Punctuating Your Sentences Correctly

       Punctuation at the end of a sentence

       Punctuation within a sentence

       Punctuation within a word

       13Choosing the Best Words

       Establishing context

       Determining the meaning

       Choosing the right voice

       An example

       Our Case Study continued

       14Acknowledging Sources Accurately and Completely

       Footnotes

       The References list

       Bibliography

       Our Case Study concluded

       15Writing the Examination Essay

       The purpose of the examination essay

       The process of writing an effective examination essay

       Other words of advice

       Index

      Preface to the Third Edition

      To succeed in your school, college, and university courses, you will be required to write many academic essays. Writing an academic essay is a demanding intellectual activity. You must read books and journal articles about your topic and surf the ‘Net for the best electronic sources, making careful and detailed notes as you proceed. You must analyse and synthesise these notes and from them develop a plan to guide you as you draft the paragraphs that will comprise your essay. You must write and revise your work, checking to make certain you are providing your readers with the detailed, authoritative information they expect. You must go through your paper yet again, this time proofreading and editing, correcting those errors in grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation, which can mar an otherwise solid effort.

      As if all of this were not challenge enough, you then must pass along all of your hard work to someone who probably knows even more than you do about the subject of your essay and about how to express knowledge about that subject clearly, persuasively, and forcefully. Finally, you must wait, while that person judges the quality of your academic essay, and assigns to it a value, in relation to the value of similar essays written by your classmates.

      The book you are holding, The Academic Essay: How to plan, draft, write and revise, will help you meet this challenge confidently and successfully. It is what you need to succeed at school and college: a step-by-step guide to writing excellent academic essays. The first four chapters explain how to gather, evaluate, organise, analyse, and synthesise the information you will need to provide content for your essay. Chapters 5 through 7 explain how to write effective introductory, body, and concluding paragraphs for academic essays. Chapters 8 through 13 teach you how to revise and edit your work, to correct errors in grammar, sentence structure, and diction. Chapter 14 explains, clearly and simply, how to acknowledge the sources you have used and chapter 15 shows you how to use all of this information to write an essay in an examination.

      The Academic Essay also includes a case study of one student, Audrey, as she works her way through each component of the process of writing an essay. You will hear from Audrey and follow her along as she considers her topic, does some research, plans her essay, drafts her paragraphs, revises, edits, and compiles her source list. By watching over Audrey’s shoulder as she methodically works her way through the process of writing her essay (about the characters in Shakespeare’s sonnets), you will gain a solid understanding of what you need to do write successful essays yourself and an understanding of how you need to proceed.

      The Academic Essay will, in short, teach you those skills in written composition that you will need to succeed in those many school, college, and university courses that require academic writing.

      Dr Derek Soles

      1 Getting Started

      One-minute overview: If you are like most students, you begin work on an academic essay immediately, by annotating the assignment sheet containing the list of topics your teacher or professor has given you. You circle the number of the topic that most appeals to you, underline a key phrase or two and make a few preliminary notes about main points to cover and references to check. Perhaps then you put a question mark beside another topic or two that you could turn to if your first choice doesn’t work out. Perhaps in other topics you find information which might provide some insights into the topic you have chosen. This is a good strategy, a good place to begin. Having selected your topic, you then must consider the expectations of your professor, who is, after all, going to be judging your work. What exactly does he or she want from you? Next, you must be clear about the purpose of your academic essay. Why are you writing this essay? What do you want to accomplish? What are your goals? Next, you need to think about your topic, determining especially how much you already know about it and how much more you need to learn.

      Finally, you need to compose your thesis, the controlling idea of your essay. In other words, to get started writing an academic essay, you need to: