Tertiary teaching in New Zealand/Academic skills/Academic writing/Rules of good writing
| Tertiary teaching in New Zealand | |
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| Unit 3: Academic skills | |
| Academic writing | Objectives | Rules of good writing | Writing an academic essay | Using other people’s work | Presenting your assignment | Summary |
Contents
Rules of good writing
It's all about structure! Good writing is good because the writer knows what he or she wants to say, and makes sure that everything in the paper not only relates to the topic, but is clearly connected 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 demonstrate how the information fits together to make you believe that which you are trying to convince your readers of. This way, the message you are trying to send out has the best chance of being understood by the reader exactly as you intended.
Document structure
It's all about structure!
You had better put a good structure in place for your written work. The structure not only needs to be present in the entire written document, but also 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 going to answer will be, and describes the pathway that the essay will take to get from the question to the answer.
| Take a look at this sample introduction:
The focus on overweight and obesity is a major preoccupation for health promotion organisations and individuals alike. On the one hand, weight-loss education initiatives and programmes abound, and on the other rates of obesity and correlated disorders skyrocket. And paradoxically, the fatter we get, the thinner we would like to be. While the population gets fatter and fatter, media portrayals, particularly of women, get more and more slender, resulting in a significant unsettling and anxiety amongst those who fail to achieve the articulated ideal. History provides an explanation for this fascination with weight. Despite the fact that people have not always valued thinness, strong beliefs about the significance of appearance nonetheless provide a foundation for the contemporary preoccupation with calorie-counting, body sculpting, exercise and diets. These practices are based on three important premises. Firstly, in the range of senses, vision ranks highest. What we see is somehow more reliable than what we hear, taste or feel. Secondly, from this follows the notion that appearance mirrors the "true" inner self, and reflects a supreme order. And finally, attention to health and diet is a virtuous activity which may be witnessed in physical appearance. This article briefly reviews how these beliefs have over many centuries, merged to set the standards which lead our contemporary society to an over-reliance on weight as an indicator of health.
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| A second sample introduction
The paragraph below is probably more like the ones you have seen in essays before. Let's look at it closely.
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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, which has supporting sentences with links, and a conclusion or transition.
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| Let's take a look at the sample paragraph below:
Thousands of people visit New Zealand every year because of its beautiful scenery and overwhelming hospitality. New Zealand has some of the most spectacular mountains in the world, due to its young volcanic landscape. It also has unusual and lush vegetation as a result of mild winters and copious rain. But the friendly people of New Zealand make travelling through this wonderland even more exciting. Few tourists will return home without at least one example of overwhelming kindness or welcome. The prospects for the tourism industry to continue to grow in this exceptional country are promising.
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| Here's another paragraph which has a strong structure. See if you can identify the different parts of the paragraph, and the tools the writer has used to make it effective.
Paul Henderson may be the least well-known and yet the most successful All Black captain ever. While few may remember his name, he was nonetheless the man who led the All Blacks to a 147 point victory over Japan in 1995. This was the widest victory margin in All Black history. In spite of the impressive win, Henderson never again captained an All Black side. Instead, he returned to his native Southland to play out his career in the national provincial championship side.
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| Let's look at the sample paragraph we used above on tourism in New Zealand:
Thousands of people visit New Zealand every year because of its beautiful scenery and overwhelming hospitality. New Zealand has some of the most spectacular mountains in the world, due to its young volcanic landscape. It also has unusual and lush vegetation as a result of mild winters and copious rain. But the friendly people of New Zealand make travelling through this wonderland even more exciting. Few tourists will return home without at least one example of overwhelming kindness or welcome. The prospects for the tourism industry to continue to grow in this exceptional country are promising. You will notice that the last sentence 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.
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