A Book Critique

               'Academic Writing: a handbook for international students'  is a book for learners of higher levels of Education which aims at developing writing skills. It was written by Bailey (2006), an experienced professor, who has taught in several countries, such as England, Spain and Japan. Due to its clear layout and rich content, it constitutes a valuable resource for all those non-native speakers who desire to achieve successful academic writing. 

               This book has a transparent design, which makes it easier for learners to understand the writing process. It is divided into four main sections, which are subdivided into sixty-one short  units. Bailey (2006) suggests that this handbook can be used throughout a whole course considering its length and complexity.

               The author regards writing as a process. Although the book provides students with a brief theoretical background of each topic, the author emphasizes practical writing skills. In this light, each unit contains exercises and an answer key. Moreover, this handout fosters integration as it offers a cross-referencing system, which helps students to assimilate the content. 

               As writing is seen as a long-term goal, this book "guides students from the initial stage of understanding essay title [...] to the organisation of the essay and finally proof-reading." (Bailey, 2006, vii). It also provides learners with revision and reference, giving priority to remedial practice of common errors. Another important contribution is that it presents models of writing, which are highly required in the Academic field. Students are encouraged to produce their own pieces to check their progress at the end of the handbook. 

               In this useful study, Bailey has succeeded in his main goal: presenting a book that helps students to go through the path of writing informal sheets to write academic pieces of work.it is clear that by proving writers with interesting, remarkable and useful tools to produce pieces of academic writing, the author has accomplished his main purpose.

Reference

Bailey, S. (2006). Academic Writing: A handbook for international students (2nd ed). Retrieved from http://npu.edu.ua/!e-book/book/djvu/A/iif_kgpm_t27.pdf

Academic summary     

 

This academic summary has the purpose to mention the key points concerning the article ¨Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing¨. The text was written by Christine M. Tardy, an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul University in Chicago, and then posted in English Teaching Forum, 1 pp. 12-19, 27. It introduces an approach based on the production of an article for Wikipedia with the objective of developing academic skills.

Firstly, this article starts explaining the difficulties writers are exposed to when they have to handle academic writing as a first experience. Thus, this text mentions among these problems the ability to conduct research, paraphrasing and adopt genre conventions (Tardy, 2010). On account of this, she proposes an approach so that students can succeed with the requirements of academic writing through a task that consists in the creation of an article for Wikipedia. In 2010, Tardy defined Wikipedia as ‘the most well-known wikis’ (p. 13) and highlights that the main purpose of this web tool is to summarize and compile existing knowledge. She also claims that although Wikipedia has become popular, it has been largely criticized and considered a second-rate source.

After defining the term Wikipedia, the Assistant Professor describes the assignment she had designed for her students in detail. She examines the purposes and objectives of the task as well as the skills the students will gradually acquire as they perform it. In the light of this, she lists the eight steps that the students have to follow in order to carry out the assignment successfully. The first step consists of ‘developing a good understanding’ of the tool itself. In other words, investigate the uses of it and its operation. After that, students will gather information and choose a possible topic for their article. When they have fulfilled this task, they will be asked to create an outline that encompasses the sources they have already selected. Then, they will organize the content and produce the first draft. Once finished this step, peer revision is required. The next step is formatting sources, which according to Tardy may be done through two different formats: foot notes or general references. Polishing the article taking into consideration the corrections suggested by a peer is the following step. Finally, the students will be able to publish their articles.

On the whole, the steps presented by the author seem to guide students to develop writing skills, which seems to be a challenge for second language writers. Thus, by following these stages carefully, academic writing will became more interesting and appealing to students. Besides, the fact that Wikipedia is worldwide recognized as a source of information and publishing writings to be read by everyone is a key factor concerning motivation.

References

  

Tardy, C. M. (2010). Writing for the World: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic writing. Retrieved from English Teaching Forum.

A Critical Analysis of the Use of APA style in Academic Writing

     APA stands for the American Psychological Association, an organization that promotes “the creation, communication, and application of psychological knowledge.” APA style has been designed by a group of psychologists, anthropologists, and business managers with the objective of establishing certain parametres for academic writing. In the light of this, the purpose of this paper is to analyze deeply the article by Dalvit, L., Murray, S. and Terzoli, A. (2005). Providing increased access to English L2 students of computer science at a South African University. US- China Education Review, Sep. 2005, Vol. 2 (9) concerning the use of in-text citations, signal phrases and reference list according to APA style.            

     To begin with, in-text citations are used in order to provide the reader with information about the bibliography used in the article. Regarding the use of in- text citations in the article US- China Education Review (2005), the authors employ paraphrase to refer to their sources. Thus, the following are examples of indirect quotations with parenthetical citations in the article: (Boughey, 2002), (Sweetnam-Evans, 2001), (Barkhuizen, 2001), (Martindale, 2002). Under these citations, there is evidence that they refer to works of one author. On the other hand, the text also presents citations making reference to groups and organizations such as Department of Education and Department of communication (2001), Council on Higher Education (2001) and Rhodes University-Information Technology Division (2004). Specific sources such as Webster's online dictionary (2005) and High Tech Dictionary (2005) are cited. Furthermore, another relevant feature of APA style that can be seen in this article is indirect quotation with author/s as part of the narrative (University of Minnesota, n.d.). Examples of this include Heugh (2002) Halliday and Martin (1993). However, the authors do not use black quotations or direct quotations.      

     The American Psychological Association also mentions signal phrases as a technique to include quoted or cited material into texts. In this case,Dalvit, L., Murray, S. and Terzoli, A., mainly use the expression “according to” to make the distinction between writer and source clear for the audience. This is evident in the following examples: According to Heogh (2002), According to Halliday and Martin (1993).  

     Finally, the reference list is used to provide appropriate details about the sources that have been used in the article. There is evidence that the reference list of the article analysed do not fully follow APA style. Although it has been presented in alphabetical order directly at the end of the article, it has not been written in a separate page from the main text and the word Reference has not been placed in the centre. Moreover, the references has not been double-spaced. As regards the structure, the reference list also presents some flaws. The title of the articles should not be italicized and web pages have been not introduced properly.                     

     All things considered, it is clear that the authors have used the APA style so as to avoid plagiarism even though the reference list does not fulfill all the requirements stated in APA style. 

References

American Physiological Association. (2010). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Dalvit, L., Murray, S. and Terzoli, A. (2005). Providing increased access to English L2 students of computer science at a South African University. US-China: education Review, Sep. 2005, Vol. 2 (9)

Walden University. (2003).  What Is APA Style and Why Do I Have to Use It. Retrieved from 

http://writingcenter.waldenu.edu/Documents/APA/What_Is_APA_and_Why_Do_I_Have_to_Use_It.pdf