Academic Writing with a Focus on Writing Argument

Course Description

       Students are the master’s level, according to experience, are already quite proficient at writing in English as a second language – ranging from the low advanced to superior levels (ACTFL scale). Experience has also shown that students can write information-driven content competently. But there are some problem areas that – in general – remain. In terms of content, integrating argument and critical dialog into academic papers, even those largely dealing with empirical questions, is often lacking. We typically find students reporting what others have written, but they fail to engage the issues raised. Students often make no attempt to engage these issues.

           Thus, we will in this course work on writing argumentative responses. This means carefully reading and understanding the arguments made by an author, defining the problems raised by the argument, and coming up with your own response. Your response you must then justify by argument, written in the spirit of dialog to an audience of critical readers, done for the purpose of deepening understanding (not ‘winning’ the argument). We assume you can state your belief and justify it with arguments; that is not what we are doing. You are to understand another’s arguments and respond in close dialog to these.

      There are also important areas of writing style and paper structure that we will work on. To this end we will focus on some of the typical problems of academic writing, writing good introductions and conclusions, finding a good writing style for you, and designing as well as developing main body paragraphs.