Asking questions

Asking questions about your subject is one way to move from subject to topic. Asking questions about your topic is one way to generate ideas for developing this topic. Some of the most standard journalistic ones: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

During World War II the English Intelligence Service planned the operation called “Foxly” to kill Adolf Hitler. While planning the operation they used this question method:

II. Structuring the Essay

The essay has an introduction, main body and conclusion.

1. Introduction

Points to remember about introduction:

1) Your introduction is important because it forms your reader’s first impression.

2) An introduction can:

- present your topic;

- arouse interest;

- provide background information;

- raising a question.

2. Main Body

Body paragraphs have two parts: the topic sentence and supporting details. The topic sentence begins the paragraph, supporting detail develops the topic presented in the topic sentence.

Example:

Almost every fashion label outside the top super-luxury brands is either already manufacturing in Asia, or thinking of it – topic sentence. Coach, the US leather goods maker, is a classic example. Over the past five years, it has lifted all its gross margins by manufacturing solely in low-cost markets – supporting details.

3. Conclusion

Among the possible approaches to conclusion are:

- summarizing your main points;

- drawing a conclusion from the ideas in your essay;

- combining approaches.

III. Writing Process involves:

generalizing ideas;

ordering ideas;

writing the first draft;

revising;

editing;

proofreading.

1) Ordering ideas – outlining

An outline helps the writer making decisions about the order of ideas. Yet many students resist outlining because they see it time-consuming, difficult and somehow unnecessary. Writers may outline more than once. Sometimes it just takes several attempts before a writer develops an organizational strategy that “works”. Outlining can be formal and informal, detailed or sketchy. You can outline using cards: one separate card for each body paragraph and one card for conclusion and one card for introduction. Each card will plot a separate section of your essay. Advantage of cards is flexibility: you can shuffle your body paragraph cards into different sequences.

2) Revision

The word revision (re-vision) means “seeing again”. Look again at your work. See your work from the readers’ point of view. Change everything doubtful.

3) Editing

Looking for errors in grammar and usage and also slips and misprints. Some writers can find their errors by reading through their work slowly studying each word and punctuation mark. Other writers read their work out loud to listen to mistakes.

4) Proofreading

Once you have edited your writing and typed it into final manuscript form, you are ready to run one last check for errors by proofreading. Proofreading is a necessary final step because it is quite possible to make mistakes when typing your work. Go through your paper slowly one word at a time. A quick reading through your work is not proofreading. Use your pen to point to each word to keep yourself from building up speed that can cause you to overlook an error.

LITERATURE

1) Barbara Fine Clouse. The student Writer, Editor and Critic. Slippery Rock University, - New-York, 1992.

2) Linda Lonon Blandon. Intermediate Composition Practice. Cambridge, 1981.

APPENDIX I

INTEGRATING YOUR SOURCES INTO PARAGRAPHS

Writing a research essay resembles putting together a mosaic. Each paragraph has its basic design, determined by its topic sentence. To carry out the design, a paragraph might contain a group of reasons or examples to illustrate its main idea, or extended explanation to develop that idea in greater detail, or a comparison between two elements introduced in the first sentence.

GUIDELINES FOR QUOTING

1. Never quote something just because it sounds impressive. The style of the quotation – the level of difficulty, the choice of vocabulary, and the degree of abstraction – should be compatible with your own style.

2. Never quote something that you find very difficult to understand.

3. Primary sources are often worth quoting – if they are clear and understandable.

APPENDIX II

Linking words

Consequently

Although

…, nevertheless

After all

Admittedly

On the other hand

In addition

By contrast

Further more

Moreover

What’s more

Besides

Equally

Likewise

On top of all

At the same time

The problem is

However

The challenge is

Above all

Even though

Meanwhile

The trend is

According to

In order to

In an attempt to

Even if/But even if

In the case of

Another difficulty is that

One solution is to

Another remedy is to

Another option is to

Ultimately/ Ultimately though

Almost every

Yet

The second thing is

It is high time

It is not just…. that

It is not a question of

Rather than

So if you have an idea of

Yet nothing is as important as

Instead of

There is no doubt about

The fact is

Not only …, but

While

If we want to solve the problem

The emphasis is on

One might assume

Compared with

Increasingly,

In the end

Today

Over the past few years

This means

The study indicated

The common trend was

Unlike

By and large

In any case

After all

Along with

Anyway

For certain

In general

By all means

In order to

For one thing

APPENDIX III

USEFUL ACADEMIC LANGUAGE

Introduction

The essay deals with…

The paper is devoted to…

Our main concern is…

It is important that we bring into clear focus…

The paper presents a comparative analyses of…

We shall examine (the relations between)…

We shall explore…

The following study is concerned with

Formulating the problem

The problem to be studied here is…

The problem raised/considered/discussed here is…

We are concerned with the problem of…

We shall dwell upon the problem of…

The core of the problem is…

Another aspect of the problem concerns…

The question therefore naturally arises that…

There are different approaches to the solution of the problem.

Analyses

It is worth analyzing precisely…

Comparative analyses reveals…

The detailed analyses reveals…

The task of the scientific analyses is…

It requires a thorough analyses…

If we now try to analyze…

Characterizing a problem

The problem is one of the most important

An important problem arises in connection with the study of…

It is one of the key problems of…

The problem of … is very complex.

This problem requires a detailed study.

The question of… has become acute.

The study of… is of primary importance.

Nevertheless, it is important to observe…

Much (little) has been done on…

The problem hasn’t received all the attention it deserves.

The question still remains open.

The question remains unclear.

Within the framework of the paper it is impossible to…

This question has been widely discussed in the literature.

Narrating general ideas

It is generally accepted that…

It is generally agreed that…

It is commonly assumed that…

It has become traditional to assume that…

As everybody knows…

It is known that…

It is a well-known fact that…

Classification

We can group it into broad types…

We can classify…

It falls into the following categories…

Coherence

It will be seen that…

As we shall see…

When we turn to…

The next point concerns …

Various aspects of the problem will be considered here…

Now we shall explore more closely…

Adding information

It should be added that…

It is worth adding the description…

In addition it may be useful to…

The other thing that should be noted is…

Emphasizing

It seems essential to emphasize that…

It is also important to show that…

It is worth pointing out that… It should never be forgotten…

We should lay special emphasis on…

A very important point to be made is…

There are special difficulties in the sphere of…

Giving examples

This example illustrates well enough…

A characteristic/typical example of this is…

One may point to numerous examples where…

The point can be best illustrated by…

A brief table illustrates some aspects of…

A few figures will illustrate…

As can be seen from the following graph…

It is not difficult to show that…

Statistics showed…

It is possible to show the direct connection with…

The difference between is illustrated by…

Conclusions and summarizing

We must conclude that…

We cannot but conclude that… From this we can conclude…

We can conclude this paper with a few observations…

All this allows us to conclude that…

Having described… we must conclude that…

We thus arrived at the following conclusions…

On the basis of the work carried out we have come to the following conclusion…

A survey of … led to the conclusion that…

We, thus, arrive at the following observation…

Finally it can be observed…

We shall try to sum up what we have been able to learn about…

We may now summarize…

To summarize …

The main result of the study was…

An important result of the study was…

As the result of the analyses made it was revealed that…

On the basis of the analysis it is possible to indicate that…

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1277