Day 15: Academic Tone and Comparative Language

Warm Up: Class Discussion  [9:30-9:40 (10min)]

1. What do you find as being the most difficult part of academic writing? What is the easiest?
2. How do you evaluate your vocabulary to know that is academic? 
3. How do you evaluate your grammar  to know that is academic?  

In the first part of today's class, we will be talking about Academic Vocabulary and Grammar. In the second half of the class we will shift to a look at comparative language structures. Both of these topics should be considered when writing your Source Synthesis Paper.  

Part I: Analysis of Student Writing [9:40-10:00 (20min)]

Get into groups of three and click on this document. I will be giving you about 10 minutes to evaluate any potential problems with these student sentences and correcting them in the space provided.  After you have made an attempt to identify and correct the language, we will be looking at my suggested revisions and discussing them as a class. Remind me to upload the revisions after class. I will put them here. 

Part II: Handout on Informal Language Correction [10:00-10:25 (25min)]

After an analysis of these errors, I will give you a handout that you will complete in pairs that deals with modification from informal structures and vocabulary to more formal structures and vocabulary. After ten minutes of pair work, we will go over the handout together as a class.

The materials come  from the book Academic Writing for Graduate Students, p. 18-25.

Part III: Comparative Language Structures [10:25-10:50 (25min)]

For the last part of today’s class, we will be working in small groups looking at language commonly found when making a comparison. I please click here to access the handout. I will be giving time to practice using the comparative language and then we will go over student samples. I will also be giving you a handout that gives alternative samples of academic text that use these structures.

Homework: No homework is scheduled for Thursday. Lucky you!
Revision Key is here