Rhetorical functions in academic writing: Defining

The process of writing an essay

Understanding Essay Questions

Lecturers often tell students that they do not want to know their opinion. But when the student hands a piece of work in, the lecturers say things such as: you haven’t answered the question, you’ve only summarised facts, what are you trying to say? etc. We need to make a distinction between a student’s uniformed, unsubstantiated opinion and the conclusions that they themselves have come to from their reading and research, what we can call their voice. This must be made clear in their writing.

video to support pre- sessional students set an assignment to write a case study report, including use of flax corpus tool, samples of business reports, and reference to business analysis tools including SWOT, Boston Matrix, five forces, etc., reference to UEFAP site, and research paper on the use of hedging and boosting and its use in case study reports in NS and NNS writing.

designed for an hour's class on plagiarism, this lecture introduces the concepts of plagiarism and Harvard/ APA referencing styles, the importance of correct referencing and most importantly: the use of an authentic authorial voice. This concept is introduced by giving three extracts from journals on fair trade, and a slide on the fair trade of chocolate, using the supplier Askinosie as an example. Students then discuss, critically evaluate, reflect and debate the concept of Fair Trade. When I tried this out on a group of first year undergraduates they performed very well at this task, and I was able to explain to them how they might use the extracts to inform and inspire discussion in their essays, and to avoid the common mistakes of summarising and paraphrasing too closely to the originals, so that they avoid patchworking in their essays.