Writing about Academic Issues

Throughout the process of preparing for a range of college assignments, students will receive instruction in skills and strategies in the following areas:

Writing Skills

A. Prewriting    

• Understand assignment instructions, including audience, purpose, and format.
• Generate ideas from written and spoken texts on a topic related to education and academic life, such as practices at Canadian post-secondary institutions, student success and motivation, access to education, the nature of learning, digital literacy, or alternative education.
• Select and narrow a topic.
• Create an outline.

B. Writing

• Demonstrate mastery of writing skills and forms covered in the previous levels.
• Develop and support one idea in a multi-paragraph composition.
• Write well-structured introductory and concluding paragraphs.
• Write a focused thesis statement.
• Write a topic sentence with a specific controlling idea.
• Develop unified, specific support in body paragraph(s) by discussing causes and/or effects, and by providing relevant examples.
• Reduce information to key ideas in a formal summary with no major omissions, paraphrasing accurately.
• Include a proper in-text citation in the first sentence of the formal summary.
• Paraphrase an idea from a text, including a proper in-text citation.
• Demonstrate an emerging level of critical thinking by responding to main ideas in a text and by relating ideas in a text to own experience or to ideas in other texts.
• Use appropriate text organization and discourse markers to signal narration, description, extended definition, comparison/contrast, or cause/effect.
• Create coherence within and between paragraphs using appropriate transition signals, pronoun references, conjunctions, and linking words and sentences.
• Use a range of vocabulary, idiomatic language, and cultural references appropriate to the context.

C. Revising

• Re-draft and revise with peer and instructor feedback.
• Proofread, edit and re-draft on own.

Accuracy

• Use the conventions of standard written English grammar for intra- and inter-clause accuracy.
• Follow academic writing conventions for organization and form.
• Use modals and real conditionals to express various levels of possibility, warnings, prediction, and advice.
• Increase text density by extending the nouns with prepositional phrases.
• Use complex sentences with adequate control.

Classroom Skills

Take responsibility for:

• Attendance and punctuality
• Class work and assignment
• Participation and teamwork

Use common software to communicate and to complete information management tasks such as word processing assignments, sending emails, or signing in to an online learning management system.