Academic Writing Lesson1

Write a short essay of around 300 words reflecting on your understanding of academic writing. Talk about why you decided to take this course, what you thought about academic writing before you started the course, and what you have learned about academic writing now that you have completed the first lesson.

My writing:

The title of this course is academic writing. Reflecting on my previous academic writing, I confess that I didn't write too much. I had a taste of writing a thesis under David's instruction on Basic Writing courses in my sophomore and junior year. It's more about the understanding of giving your statement and finding evidence to support it. When it comes to the graduate paper, I did struggle a lot in that academic writing with many oral sentences in the paper. Seeing all those professional pieces of writing, I considered that I am still far away from those scholars.

After listening to the professor's lessons, I summarized some points that I totally agree with. Firstly, if we are determined to be critical writers, we must be critical readers first. Learning to Identify a good article always matters to writing your own. Secondly, the simple tricks of academic writing are to get a clear point to prove and gather sufficient evidence and reasons for the argument. Thirdly, for the process of writing, there are mainly four steps: pre-writing and outlining, writing the first draft, revising and editing. For pre-writing, it mentioned four techniques: free writing, asking questions, making a list and scratch outline. For the first draft, usually we focus on the content itself and think about the essay as a whole. For revising and editing, we can ask the following questions. Is my paper unified? Is my paper supported? Is my paper organized? Do I use specific words? Do I vary my sentences?

Knowing these tips might not come to use immediately, but it does make the whole process clear for me. Writing is like a bridge to connect people and worlds. By learning how to write concisely and precisely, I believe that I can also be a smart person.