开普敦大学

Writing your World: Finding yourself in the academic space

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Throughout the world, writing serves to express, record and even create meaningful moments. In academic spaces, writing becomes the bridge between ourselves and the world of ideas. In this course, we provide practical insights into how to write an academic essay. We show you how to develop the academic skills needed to be a competent academic writer. You will have an opportunity to engage with texts written by academics, and to see how some of the ideas in these texts are used by students in constructing an academic essay. We address some of the challenges these students face with respect to academic writing and offer you the opportunity to practice and to develop your own writing style. For this course, we centre our lessons around a specific topic - the concept of identity, since it forms such an important feature of how we locate ourselves in an ever-changing global world. In other words, this course teaches academic writing skills through getting you to write and reflect on your understanding of identity. So if you are thinking about studying at a tertiary institution, or if you just want to brush up on your academic essay writing skills, this course is for you!

从本节课中

Starting to finish: writing the first draft

This week we sum up the ground we have covered in this course. The week is about crafting your final essay draft. We recap the building blocks of writing an academic essay, relooking at the features of an introduction, body, conclusion and the purposes of cohesion, coherence and referencing. We also consider and provide engaged feedback on the draft essays written by our three virtual students. There is detailed feedback on the strengths, improvements and opportunities for further improvement on the essays. The feedback is aligned with the core skills introduced in the course, such as writing the topic sentence, linking sentences and ensuring coherence and cohesion. Thereafter we sum up the course with a discussion on the ideas of the four thinkers you were introduced to in this course, namely Woodward, Sichone, Blommaert and Thornton.

Looking back on the course2:07

Round table discussion: Reflection on the readings14:44

The essay building blocks5:36

Referencing and managing sources5:54

Giving feedback on Ziggy's draft7:40

Giving feedback on Joey's draft3:45

Giving feedback on Ada's draft3:32

Looking forward2:16

与讲师见面

Gideon Nomdo
Lecturer
Centre for Higher Education Development
Aditi Hunma
Lecturer
Centre for Higher Education Development

[MUSIC]

Now let's read through Joey's essay, in the introduction, we note that Joey has

taken on a much more formal tone, which is much more acceptable in academic writing.

His thesis statement is foregrounded up front here,

and signals the position he wants to occupy, which is

that identity is a matter of choice and that it is constructed and fluid.

His thesis statement reads.

>> Individuals have a degree of choice in the identity that they construct.

>> He has resolved the apparent contradiction in his previous draft, and

has now presented this problematic statements as other people's views

through the use of scare quotes, which is a device that writers use

to distance themselves from a particular issue.

Joey reinforces this distancing by offering

another statement to reinforce the position he has taken.

In his second paragraph, Joey's topic sentence reads much better making the link

between crossing borders and homophobia, it reads.

>> The effects of crossing borders needs to be addressed with respect

to homophobia.

>> He has tightened the paragraph by comparing border crossing,

across nations, to border crossing across sexual orientations.

Showing the violent nature of each and using Sichone to support this idea.

Joey makes a clear link between this paragraph and

the previous one through the notion of value and devaluing.

He paraphrases Blommaert and then extends the understanding of texts to

apply to bodies as scripts with symbols or markers of identity.

He just needs to spell out more clearly that bodies can be texts,

this is a good creative move around the understanding of what a text is.

His paragraph balances the constraints that come with crossing borders and

the enabling possibilities that come with making choices.

Joey restates his thesis statement in the conclusion,

which is a good move, however, the conclusion is too short.

Joey would additionally need to summarise

some of those complex ideas that he discussed in the body of his essay,

such as showing the overlap between homophobia and xenophobia.

And appropriating Blommaert's argument to include bodies as texts,

in terms of references, Joey makes good use of in-text references,

his reference list, however, needs to be reworked.

Firstly, the book titles such as Discourse and

New South African keywords should be in italics.

Joey forgot to mention the name of the book editors for the book,

New South African keywords.

The reference should read as follows Sichone, O.

2008.

Xenophobia.

In New South African keywords.

N. Shepherd & S.

Robins, Eds.

Johannesburg: Jacana Press.

Also, Joey would need to complete the reference to Woodward's book as follows,

Woodward, K.

2004 Questioning identity: Gender, class, ethnicity.

London: Routledge.

Now you can look back on the tasks you submitted for

the first three weeks and the feedback you received from your peers.

Think about how these can be incorporated as you write your first full essay draft.

Feel free to make some changes to the working progress.

[MUSIC]