One of the largest challenges to moving from high school writing to more advanced work is the challenge to write something original. This doesn’t mean you have to invent some whole new theory of life, the universe, and everything. Rather, it means you have to make your reader think.
You can’t just regurgitate a bunch of facts from the internet or your class notes. So how do you turn the general idea of “Holden Caulfield is alienated from his community” into something original? Something that hasn’t been written about hundreds of times already?
Read on Macduff…
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Know your audience – presentation skills
Presentation skills culture varies widely from industry to industry, organization to organization. In the absence of specific guidelines or expectations use our concrete guidelines to design and give great presentations. If possible, review examples of previous presentations given at your organization and adjust accordingly.
A Poster Child for Persuasive Speech: Pharrell Showcasing Rhetoric on The Voice
Adjusting Expectations: Excessive Elaboration
Longer is not always better! Limit your sentences to a few clauses, and alternate long sentences and short sentences. Academic writing in English tends to have long, sophisticated noun phrases, but it is not a requirement to include complex sentence structure and long strings of joined clauses.
ANALYZE Evidence to Support Your Thesis
Actionable tips and examples to help you move deeper into the evidence you’ve already got.
Analyzing Audience to Maximize Your Impact (and Grades)
Understanding how most teachers view student attitudes and approaches to work can help you succeed.
Analyzing Your Audience – the First Rule of Effective Writing
The first step to effective communication? Understanding your audience – including TEACHERS. Specific help for writing for the teacher audience.
Analyzing Your Business Audience
APA Paper Formatting with Sample & Comments
Summary of APA document formatting basics with a sample paper you can download from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue. The sample includes annotations explaining the various rules (PDF).
Apostrophes
Article Use (a, an, the…)
Using articles appropriately is one of the most difficult grammatical points in English to master. It is not necessarily essential in speech, but it’s something that should be checked for when writing.
Assignment Expectations: Excessive Adherence to Inappropriate Structures
It may be confusing, even annoying, but some of the structures you may have learned in test prep classes and English language classes, such as the five-paragraph essay, may not be appropriate for use in other classes. Be careful to follow assignment instructions.
Assignment Expectations: Reflection Writing
Reflection writing assignments are common in many classes, especially as a response to reading assignments. It is distinctive from other types of academic writing because it encourages the writer to write in the first person, but usually it has the same expectations as other academic writing assignments in other ways.
Audience, Purpose, and Tone: Hedging – good and bad
Hedging is a way of using language to make an argument more effective by softening or strengthening it. An idea expressed without appropriate hedging may seem too general, too confident, or too extreme. Specific vocabulary and writing strategies can be learned and used to hedge appropriately.
Audience, Purpose, and Tone: Objectivity
Attempt to cultivate objectivity. Objectivity is an overall goal in academic writing, even if the goal is to convince the reader of something. It demonstrates that the emphasis is on the object – your writing, your research – not on you yourself.
Avoid ‘Just’ Opinions
Avoid a VAGUE Thesis
Avoid Logical GOOFS (Logical Fallacies)
Fallacies are statements that sound logical but, if you stop and think, really aren’t. Avoid in your own writing and critique in others’.
Awkward Construction
Balancing Repetition and Variety
As you learn to write in English, you will learn how to balance repetition and variety, to ensure cohesion. One strategy to accomplish this purpose is to vary the way you refer to people and things. After the first reference to a noun form, you can refer to it with pronouns and demonstratives until the topic changes.
Bibliography
Blasting Through Writers’ Block
Think you’re the only one who stares at the blank screen with feat/anxiety/anger/boredom? Nope. Every writer who ever lived has felt the same way. This resource will walk you through the most common and suggest some ways to deal. There’s always cleaning the bathroom or doing your taxes – if you REALLY want to avoid writing.
Block Quotes
Brainstorm a Topic and Finish a First Draft
When you sit down to write, do you immediately think of 23 other things you’d rather be doing? Does your hand itch to grab your phone and start texting, or does Facebook suddenly seem more alluring than ever? Does your mind just seem filled with clouds instead of thoughts and words you can use?
Can Patrick Swayze Help Students Write More Effectively?
Need some ideas for writing assignments that help learners “dig down” into a subject and think about it in complex ways? Try asking students to write about Hollywood ‘reboots’ of 80s and 90s entertainment – like ’21 Jump Street’ and ‘Red Dawn.’
Capitalization
Choosing the Right Words
Choosing the right word is often more complicated than translating, which often leads to issues of appropriacy. Translating without a clear understanding of vocabulary can lead to the use of words that are rare, obsolete, or belong to an inappropriate genre or register.
CLOSELY Read ‘The Text’ to Squeeze Out All Its Meaning
In any high school or college class where you’re reading texts and writing about them, your writing will be more effective if you know how to perform what teachers call a “close reading.” Similarly, if you’re writing a business report or proposal, you’ll be much more likely to reach your goals if the document reflects a close, careful reading of your primary sources.