Distancelanguagelearning/English Web/writing/Academic Writing/Principles

Good writing is good because the writer has expressed clearly what he or she wants to say, has made sure that everything relates to the topic, and has ensured that the ideas are clearly connected and easy for the reader to follow.

This means that to write well, you have to state your position, reveal the information that supports your position, and show how the information fits together. This way, the message you are trying to send out has the best chance of being understood by the reader exactly as you intended.

It's all about structure!

When planning your writing assignment you need to think about


 * the structure of your document or research paper;
 * the structure of individual paragraphs.

For an overview of the structure of an essay, you might like to visit this site.

Document structure
It is important to put a good structure in place in your writing. The structure needs to be present in both the entire document and in each part of the document.

Once you know what you are going to write about (we talk about that a bit later in the module), you have to make the framework for your written work. It always involves writing an introduction that


 * attracts the reader's attention,
 * shows the reader what the question you are answering is, and
 * describes the pathway that the essay will take to get from the question to the answer.

For more information about writing introductions to your essays, you might want to visit this site, which explains the "top-down" model.

Paragraph structure
Just like the essay, the paragraphs in your essay must be well structured. To do this, you have to have a good understanding of what makes a paragraph.

A paragraph is how we organise sentences into groups. It is a unit of thought and not of length. Being a "unit of thought" means that it deals with only one main idea.

How is a paragraph structured? Like an essay,


 * the writer introduces it by a topic sentence,
 * followed by supporting sentences with links, and
 * finally a conclusion or transition.

You will notice that the last sentence in the example above is preparing the reader for a new idea. While the paragraph is about the things that attract people to New Zealand, the next paragraph should logically be about the growth of tourism, and the concluding sentence announces this.

Links to more information and exercises
This Central European University site has more information about writing paragraphs.

The OWL at Purdue is a long-established site that clearly explains the structure of paragraphs.

Not only does this site have further explanation about writing paragraphs, it also has some exercises for you to do.