Introduction to Academic Writing 101

Hi there are welcome to academic writing 101.

Thank you for your desire to improve your writing and thank you for choosing this course.

I really look forward to working with you.

Let me begin today by telling you a little bit about myself so my name is Mike Taylor.

I’m currently a Ph.D. candidate in English and I have taught academic writing and English as a second

language at the university and high school levels throughout the United States Germany China Hong Kong

and Korea and I’m currently teaching academic writing at a university in Canada.

My ultimate goal as an instructor is to help students gain confidence in their writing by giving them

the tools and strategies they need to write successfully at the college level.

Now before I walk you through the goals and the structure of the Course I’d like to begin by laying

out a few of the common complaints that I hear the most common complaints I hear as I meet with my students

and discuss their writing see if any of these sound familiar to you.

I never know what my professor is looking for.

Most of my mistakes are grammar spelling and other writing mistakes have nothing to do with the subject

matter.

The grading of writing is so subjective that I was a great writer in high school.

I’m just not a good writer.

It’s not one of my things for me over the years as I continue to interact with students and help them

to grow and develop as writers.

These common complaints translate into one fundamental problem and that is that the majority of students

enter college having never been taught the expectations and the essentials of good academic writing.

And that’s exactly what I set out to do on this course.

So let’s first talk about some goals of this course.

By the end of this course you’ll be able to write with clarity and precision you’ll be able to develop

and support your own ideas persuasively.

You will have begun to develop your own unique style voice and flow.

You’ll understand how to organize your ideas logically and with clear transitions.

You will learn how to locate and incorporate sources effectively into your own writing.

And lastly you’ll be able to demonstrate mastery of the fundamentals of sentence structure formatting

punctuation and the way I’m going to help you to reach these goals set up with six overarching theme.

So the Course is broken down into six themes.

They they’ll see as the six sections we have first the writing process.

Organizing your ideas developing your writing style a punctuation crash course.

I’m going to walk you through the common college writing assignments and give you the strategies necessary

to excel in any form of college writing.

And then we’ll move beyond the university and do just a little bit of pre-professional writing.

Just the absolute basics of pre-professional writing and under each of these themes will be a number

of mini lectures anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes to provide you with everything you need to know within

each of these themes.

And finally I’d like to offer you a few course extras some perks of being students in this course.

First I promise to always reply promptly to any questions or concerns you might have.

And I also offer unlimited reviews of any preparatory writing projects that means outlines thesis statements

and so on.

As one of my students shall be entitled to an office hour which is a 60 minute one on one writing consultation.

You’ll also be entitled to an individual paper review so I will do a full detailed review of one of

your papers so that doesn’t mean a thesis or a big capstone paper or something like that.

But a normal class paper of up to 12 pages or so a friendly tip is that it might be most beneficial

for you to submit a paper for review first and then ask for a one on one writing consultation so that

we can discuss in detail in depth some of the things you can work on in your writing.

But of course you don’t have to do that.

You can ask for an office hour or a paper review at any time.

Finally and I will tell you more about this in the very final lecture.

But I offer you future writing consultations at a reduced rate on any academic or other writing.

But again I’ll tell you more about that in the final lecture.

Until then thank you so very much for choosing this course.

I really look forward to working with you.

My goal is not simply to provide you with all of this information but to really be there as a mentor

and a coach to give you the encouragement and the strategies and tools and so on necessary for you to

really excel at writing at the college level.

So please never hesitate to contact me with any questions comments or concerns that you might have and

I wish you happy writing.