Academic Writing
Session 7 – The Academic Essay (The Process Approach to Writing)
Session Overview
•Writing involves series of steps or activities known as the writing process. This includes several steps that build on one another. First of all, there is the pre-writing stage where you choose a topic, think about your purpose and audience, discover ideas about your topic and research and gather information on your topic. The second stage is the drafting stage. This involves outlining your ideas and writing the first rough version of your essay. The third is the revision stage. This stage involves rewriting the essay as many times as possible until the ideas become clearer, more detailed, and better organized. This means that you may have to reorganize sentences and paragraphs. The fourth and the final stage is the editing stage.
OBJECTIVES
By the end of this section you will be able to do the following:
•Choose and narrow a topic to make it more focused
•Think about your purpose, audience, and point of view and
•relate to them
•Discover ideas about your topic
•Research your topic
Session Outline
The key topics to be covered in the session are as follows:
•Choosing and narrowing your topic
•Discovering ideas to write about
•researching your topic
•Planning
•First draft
Reading List
•A) Chapter 1, Elbow, Writing With Power
•B) Units 1-4, Meyers (2005) Gateways to Academic Writing pp. 2-42
Topic One
CHOOSING AND NARROWING A TOPIC
•Let us assume that you have been asked to write an academic essay but no topic has been prescribed by the instructor; i.e. you have been asked to find your own topic. In this situation, the topic that comes to your mind may be a broad one. For example, you may want to write about ‘Ghana’. But this means that you have to write everything and anything about Ghana. It is not possible to write everything you know about Ghana so you need to narrow this topic to a manageable scope. For example, you may choose to discuss ‘education in Ghana’, or ‘Politics in Ghana’, or ‘Tradition and Culture in Ghana’, etc. Let’s say you have chosen to discuss ‘Politics in Ghana’. ‘Politics in Ghana’ is still a very broad topic because it implies you will discuss everything and anything about this topic (e.g. the long history of politics in Ghana, current political issues, national politics, local politics, elections, etc). You can’t possibly handle all of these, so, once again, you need to narrow it to have a clearer focus. For example, you may choose to write about ‘Electioneering Campaigns in Ghanaian Politics’ or ‘Military Regimes in Ghana’ or ‘The Role of Political Parties in Ghana’.
•As soon as you have a topic, whether self-selected or lecturer-assigned, you have to carefully analyse the writing task to determine what your audience would expect of you. Think about the following: your purpose, your audience and your point of view.
Choosing and narrowing Topic-PURPOSE
•Purpose
•As you are considering a specific topic or an assigned one, think about the purpose for which you are writing such a paper. Though the general aim of most writing is to communicate, an essay must have a purpose. There are three major purposes for which a paper may be written. These are to entertain your readers, inform your readers, or to persuade your readers to accept a particular viewpoint. For example, an essay on ‘Environmental Pollution’ may seek to inform your readers about the causes of environmental pollution, or to persuade your readers to take a particular action against those who pollute the environment. Ask yourself the following questions: Why am I writing this essay and what exactly do I want to achieve with this piece of writing? An essay can have more than one purpose. For example you may want to write on a particular festival in Ghana to explain to your readers how it is celebrated (inform), and/or urge your readers to try and participate in one (persuade)
Choosing and narrowing Topic-AUDIENCE
•Your audience are the people who read your essay and they are also an important part of the writing process. Many aspects of your writing—for example how you express yourself, the types of sentence structure you choose, your choice of words, amount of details and examples you include, your attitude towards the topic—depend heavily on your audience. You need to know your audience by their age, their educational background, their knowledge about the topic and expectations as readers to plan your essay. For most academic essays, your lecturer is your audience. Supposing you are writing on ‘Agents of Socialization in Ghana’ for your Sociology lecturer, who obviously knows a great deal about the topic, you are all the same not expected to ignore giving enough details in the essay. Note that your lecturer wants to know if you understand the topic and whether you can clearly write about it. You therefore need to provide enough information to demonstrate your knowledge of the subject. Include enough background information, relevant details and define technical terms if there are any to make your essay easy to understand and follow.
Choosing and narrowing Topic- POINT OF VIEW
•Another important thing to consider when writing is your point of view. This refers to the perspective from which you are writing the essay. Choosing a point of view will depend on your topic, your purpose, and your audience.
•There are three types of point of view. These are first, second, and third persons point of view.
•For an essay narrating an event in which you participated, you may find the first person pronoun (I, we,) more appropriate.
•The second person pronoun (you) may be more appropriate in an essay that explains how something is done or how a particular research is carried out.
•In Academic Writing, however, the third person (he/she/it, and they) is used because it is less personal, more formal and more detached than the other points of view.
Activity
Choose two of the following broad topics and narrow it down to a topic that can be managed within a two- to four-page essay.
1.Safe transportation
2.Population explosion
3.Mental illness
Topic Two
Discovering Ideas to Write About
•As I have mentioned in the introduction to this section, writing is a process of discovery. Another important, but not so easy, aspect of writing is finding enough to say about your topic.
•There are some techniques that you can use to generate ideas on your topic. The most common methods are described below.
•Study each one of them and try using them before deciding on the one that best works for you.
Discovering Ideas to Write About- FREE WRITING
•Free-writing means jotting down in rough sentences or phrases everything that comes to mind about a possible topic. When free-writing, you write non-stop for a limited period of time, usually five to ten minutes.
•Write whatever comes to mind regardless of its relevance to your topic. Do not worry about finding the exact words to express your thought, spelling and punctuating correctly, or organizing the material in a particular way. Instead, let your mind run free to explore ideas
•Your initial ideas and impressions will become clearer after you have put them on paper and these may lead to other ideas and impressions. Doing this will help you develop the habit of thinking while you write. Let us look at the following example of free-writing on the topic, “Things that annoy me”:
FREE WRITING
There are a lot of things that I get annoyed by. One of them that comes to mind is politicians, in fact I am so annoyed about them that I don’t even want to say anything about them. They are all the same and they are not to be trusted. Another thing that bothers me are people who keep complaining about everything but does nothing about them. If you are having trouble, do something about it. Don’t just keep complaining and just talking. I’m also really annoyed by traffic on our roads. This is partly because there are too many cars on our roads. Everybody wants to own a car. Anyway you can’t blame them because the public transportation system is also not reliable.
•Note that in this free-writing we can find something to write about politicians, traffic congestion in Accra, the bad nature of roads etc. These are potentially interesting topics to develop into full essays, and the important point is that they were generated through free-writing.
Discovering Ideas to Write About- BRAINSTORMING
•Brainstorming involves listing everything you can think of about your topic. Put down facts, impressions, reactions as well as emotions. You can list them by putting down phrases and words instead of complete sentences.
•With this technique as well, give yourself a time limit. This will force ideas to come faster.
•The following is an example of brainstorming on an issue that we can pick from my free-writing above: the misuse of electronic communication devices.
The misuse of electronic communication devices.
What electronic devices do I use?
For what purpose?
Where do people use electronic tools?
Where/When should such devices be banned?
Where/When can electronic comm. devices constitute a danger?
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