Grammar for Academic Writing: Making your Writing more ..., Study notes of Business Administration

Download Grammar for Academic Writing: Making your Writing more ... and more Study notes Business Administration in PDF only on Docsity! Grammar for Academic Writing: Making your Writing more Readable “Every writer wishes to make their points clearly to their readers, with pieces of writing that are are easy to read and have logical links between the various points made. This coherence, this clarity of expression, is created by grammar and vocabulary (lexis) through cohesion. This is the "glue" that joins your ideas together to form a cohesive whole.” (Academic English Online) http://aeo.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/Files/Cohesion/Cohesion.html Jenkins (1987) has researched the life cycle of new businesses. He found that they have average life of only 4.7 years. This is due to two main reasons: one economic and one social. The former appears to be a lack of capital, the latter a failure to carry out sufficient market research. Jenkins considers that together these account for approximately 70% of business failures. Reference Reference word/phrase Jenkins he new businesses average life of only 4.7 years one economic one social the former…, the latter Jenkins (1987) has researched the life cycle of new businesses. He found that they have average life of only 4.7 years. This is due to two main reasons: one economic and one social. The former appears to be a lack of capital, the latter a failure to carry out sufficient market research. Jenkins considers that together these account for approximately 70% of business failures. Reference Reference word/phrase Jenkins he new businesses they average life of only 4.7 years This one economic The former one social The latter the former…, the latter these There is little prospect of improvement in the standard of living of the villagers from their present low level Without the support of electricity. Presently, the households can enjoy only a limited number of hours of illumination based on kerosene or diesel. These are not cheap and so are not affordable by a large majority of the rural masses. This restricts the range as well as the intensity of their activities severely. But even if supply of power from these sources is available more abundantly, there is the problem of adverse effects of such use. Reference Reference word/phrase their these this their these sources such sources One group of commentators have little faith in the ability of food availability to improve child nutrition. a)Their arguments are supported by the fact that two-thirds of malnourished children live in countries with food supplies adequate for b) their population’s needs. c) They point to problems of poverty and to non food factors, such as children’s health and the quality of d) their care. e) Their belief is that both factors, but especially f) the former (which is increasing in many countries), play a more significant part in malnutrition than is often admitted. Substitution 1. The scientific study of memory began in the early 1870s when a German philosopher, Hermann Ebbinghaus, came up with the revolutionary idea that memory could be studied experimentally. In ______ ______he broke away from a 2000-year-old tradition that firmly assigned the study of memory to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. 2. I’ll get married, before you _________. 3. A: I’ll see you in the morning before I go home. 4. B: Well, I hope _____. 1. Some of the water which falls as rain flows on the surface as streams. Another part of the water is evaporated. The remainder of the water sinks into the ground and is known as ground water. 2. The younger child was very outgoing; the older child was much more reserved. How could you improve these two texts? Addition Contrast Example Emphasise Introduce an effect or result also in addition furthermore moreover however in contrast nevertheless despite in spite on the other hand on the contrary for example for instance in fact as a result therefore thus hence consequently Examples of Sentence Connectors Which of these two texts is more cohesive? Text A Attracting customers to buy your products and services needs a great deal of research and planning to ensure the money you invest in gaining customers pays off. This is normally achieved through market research and involves finding more about the people you hope to sell to. Armed with this information you can then formulate an effective plan of action based on your evidence. Once you are aware of the needs of your potential customers you need to examine your product in detail, fix a suitable price which will help your product sell, ensure you choose the correct method of distribution and select an appropriate promotion to attract your audience. This is known as the marketing mix and can help your business to spend money wisely with the best results. Text B Attracting customers to buy your products and services needs a great deal of research and planning to ensure the money you invest in gaining customers pays off. Firstly, there is market research and involves finding more about the people you hope to sell to. Secondly, formulate an effective plan of action based on your fix a suitable price which will help your product sell, ensure you choose the correct method of distribution and select an appropriate promotion to attract your audience. So this is known as the marketing mix and in summary it can help your business to spend money wisely with the best results. Adapted from http://www.dcielts.com/ Repetition 1. Simple Patients who repeatedly take overdoses pose considerable management difficulties. The problem-orientated approach is not usually effective with such patients. When a patient seems to be developing a pattern of chronic repeats, it is recommended that all staff engaged in his or her care meet to reconstruct each attempt in order to determine whether there appears to be a motive common to each act. 2. Complex In each of these cases the basic problem is the same: a will has been made, and in it a debtor is left a legacy of liberatio from what he owes the testator. The question is, if he has subsequently borrowed more from the testator, up to what point he has been released from his debts. It is best to begin with the second case. Here there is a straightforward legacy to the debtor of a sum of money and also of the amount of his debt to the testator. This is followed by a clause in which there is a general damnatio and also a general trust that the legacies in the will be paid. The debtor goes on to borrow more money, and the question is whether that is taken to be included in the legacy too. The response is that since the words relate to the past, later debts are not included. Effective mitigation will not be achieved if individual agents advance their own interests independently. Climate change has the characteristics of a collective action problem at the global scale, because most greenhouse gases (GHGs) accumulate over time and mix globally, and emissions by any agent (e. g., individual, community, company, country) affect other agents. International cooperation is therefore required to effectively mitigate GHG emissions and address other climate change issues. Furthermore, research and development in support of mitigation creates knowledge spillovers. International cooperation can play a constructive role in the development, diffusion and transfer of knowledge and environmentally sound technologies http://report.mitigation2014.org/spm/ipcc_wg3_ar5_summary-for- policymakers_approved.pdf What examples of repetition and the use of synonyms do you notice in this text you saw earlier? Effective mitigation will not be achieved if individual agents advance their own interests independently. Climate change has the characteristics of a collective action problem at the global scale, because most greenhouse gases (GHGs) accumulate over time and mix globally, and emissions by any agent (e. g., individual, community, company, country) affect other agents. International cooperation is therefore required to effectively mitigate GHG emissions and address other climate change issues. Furthermore, research and development in support of mitigation creates knowledge spillovers. International cooperation can play a constructive role in the development, diffusion and transfer of knowledge and environmentally sound technologies Anaphoric (“shell”) nouns Moulds do not usually grow fast, and conditions had to be found in which large quantities of Penicillium notatum could be produced as quickly as they were wanted. The solution to this p__________ was helped by N. G. Heatley, a young biochemist also from Hopkins's laboratory in Cambridge, who had been prevented by the outbreak of war from going to work in the Carlsberg laboratories in Copenhagen. Reports of original work, headed often by the names of many joint authors, became too full of jargon to be understood even by trained scientists who were not working in the particular field. This s_________ persists today, though strong movements towards interdisciplinary research help to avoid total fragmentation of scientific understanding. . This led many later Greek thinkers to regard musical theory as a branch of mathematics (together with geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy it constituted what eventually came to be called the quadrivium). This v_____, however, was not universally accepted, the most influential of those who rejected it being Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fourth century BC). 1. Many high school students have problems fitting in socially. These ____________________ 2. There has been a growing trend for graduate degrees to take longer. This_____________ 3. There are three interesting features in the new design. These_________________________ 4. The first stage of the research was to collect data. In this __________________________ • Leonardo da Vinci 15th century Italian genius • produced only a handful of finished paintings • Mona Lisa + Last Supper • Last Supper > most famous painting in world? • remembered mainly as an artist • also innovative engineer, scientist and anatomist Leonardo da Vinci was a fifteenth-century Italian genius who produced only a handful of finished works. However, they include the Mona Lisa and the last Supper, the former perhaps the most famous painting in the world. Although he is remembered mainly as an artist, he also was an innovative engineer, scientist and anatomist. Adapted from Bailey (2011) Information Flow Version 1 Norma has had a terrible five years. Someone stole her car and set it on fire in 2010. Two of her toes had to be amputated the year after that. A road accident killed her husband in 2012. The other driver’s carelessness was the cause of the crash. A storm damaged her house earlier this year. Version 2 Norma has had a terrible five years. In 2010 her car was stolen and set on fire. The year after that she had to have two of her toes amputated. In 2012 her husband was killed in a road accident. The cause of the crash was the other driver’s carelessness. Earlier this year her house was damaged by a storm. A) Version 1 The enthalpy of hydrogen bond formation between the nucleoside bases 2'deoxyguanosine (dG) and 2'deoxycytidine (dC) has been determined by direct measurement. dG and dC were derivatized at the 5' and 3' hydroxyls with triisopropylsilyl groups to obtain solubility of the nucleosides in non-aqueous solvents and to prevent the ribose hydroxyls from forming hydrogen bonds. From isoperibolic titration measurements, the enthalpy of dC:dG base pair formation is -6.65±0.32 kcal/mol. A) Version 2 We have directly measured the enthalpy of hydrogen bond formation between the nucleoside bases 2'deoxyguanosine (dG) and 2'deoxycytidine (dC). dG and dC were derivatized at the 5' and 3' hydroxyls with triisopropylsilyl groups. These groups serve both to solubilize the nucleosides in non-aqueous solvents and to prevent the ribose hydroxyls from forming hydrogen bonds. From isoperibolic titration measurements, the enthalpy of dC:dG base pair formation is -6.65±0.32 kcal/mol. Task adapted from Gopen and Swann (1990) 1. The rheme of one sentence becomes the theme of the next sentence. Example The complete electrical behaviour of any valve or transistor can be described by stating the interrelation of the currents and the voltages between all the electrodes. These relationships can conveniently be displayed graphically, and the various curves are known as the 'characteristics' of the device. In principle, all the characteristics should be available to the designer proposing to use the device in a circuit. (W. P. Jolly, (1972). Electronics, p. 61) The linking pattern Since the advent of communicative language testing in the 1970s, authenticity has been a concern in language testing and it has often been argued that if we wish to predict a candidate’s ability to communicate in the real world, then texts and tasks should be as similar to that real world as possible. Bachman (1991) makes a distinction between ‘situational authenticity’ and ‘interactional authenticity’. Situational authenticity, glossed as ‘life-likeness’, is held to involve some degree of replication, in a test, of actual speech events in language use situations. In contrast, interactional authenticity is ‘a function of the extent and type of involvement of test takers’ language ability in accomplishing a test task’ (op.cit: 91). Later, Bachman and Palmer (1996) consider authenticity to be a critical quality of language tests, alongside validity, reliability, consequences, interactiveness and practicality. They separate the notion of authenticity from that of interactiveness and define authenticity as ‘the degree language test task to the features of a TLU [target language use] task’ (1996:23). Super-theme sub-themes Alderson, J., & Banerjee, J. (2002). Language testing and assessment (Part 2). Language Teaching, 35(2), 79-113. Theme preview pattern The literature offers four explanations for this puzzling phenomenon. The first explanation is that good jobs come in bundles. Managers who know how to design one part of a job well are also likely to design other parts well, and are likely to work in organisations that treat employees well. The second explanation is that job satisfaction creates a halo effect. When employees are satisfied with their jobs, they are attitudinally biased to evaluate many of their aspects of the jobs s favourably. The third explanation is common method bias. This explanation has been largely refuted, as several have shown that the common method variance does not lead to the overprediction of self-reports. The fourth explanation is common source bias. Some scholars have argued that common source biases are responsible for inflated correlations between satisfaction and self-report variables. A blended pattern (Machines + tea hatinetatnee. Le ——- en solvent were made manually, but... allow engineers to produce three dimensional modebs, vlich .. Source: http://sana.tkk.fi/awe/cohesion/infostrux/given/index.htm| Paragraph Transitions A) Master’s Dissertation in East Asian Relations B) Mathematics journal article Interestingly/More precisely/Initially/Additionally/Similarly It should therefore be clear that…/It is therefore important/Therefore… The first/second/third school of thought… While there was tremendous effort in,… The reasons for the X Another aspect/example/incident Further proof… These changes/actions/statements/developments… This is not the only example.. This statement/failure This is a clear X It is clear that the X The significance of x is… More significantly, Despite x,.. We therefore… As noted earlier Recall that… We have already seen… As in section… Next suppose that The next result shows… Another proof of x is…. This suggests… This is not an/an… Of the four commonly tested foreign language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), it could be argued that listening is the one of most importance. Not only do we spend up to almost half of our daily lives listening (Feyten, 1991), it is also the skill that people are most interested in when enquiring about general English language proficiency (Buck, 2001). Yet listening is also probably the most difficult of the language skills to assess. Listening involves a highly complex interplay of neurological, linguistic, semantic and pragmatic processes (Brunfaut, 2017; Rost, 2002); none of which, unfortunately for the assessor, can be directly observed. The complexity and ‘invisibility’ of listening has not, however, prevented researchers from developing either theoretical (e.g. Richards, 1983) or empirically-based (e.g. Buck et al, 1997) lists or ‘taxonomies’ of listening sub-skills. In more recent years, these have come to include the use of the listening criteria incorporated within the Common European Framework (CEF) (Council of Europe, 2001). Although not without its critics (e.g. Fulcher, 2017; Weir, 2005), the CEF is now increasingly used as a basis for the assessment of foreign language skills, not only within private institutions across Europe, but also in several national secondary school education systems, including in Austria. t Further Practice Cohesion http://www.uefap.com/writing/parag/par_coh.ht http://aeo.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/Files/Cohesion/Cohesion.html Cohesion and Coherence http://aeo.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/Files/Cohesion/Cohesion.html http://aeo.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/Files/Cohesion/Cohesion.html Coherence http://awelu.srv.lu.se/grammar-and-words/coherence/ Cohesion http://sana.aalto.fi/awe/cohesion/index.html Transitional Words and Phrases http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Transitions.html ELE Academic Writing Courses 1. Grammar For Academic Writing http://www.ed.ac.uk/english-language-teaching/students/current-students/elsis/elsis- courses/grammar-for-academic-writing 2. Academic Writing for International Students http://www.ed.ac.uk/english-language-teaching/students/current-students/elsis/elsis- courses/academic-writing-international-students 3. PhD Writing Courses + Independent Study Materials References Bailey, S. (2011) Academic Writing A Handbook for International Students 3rd Edition. Routledge: Oxon. Emmott (2013) 10 Billion. London: Penguin. Gopen, G.D. & Swan, J.A. (1990). The science of scientific writing. American Scientist, 78 (6), 550-558. Nicholas, R. (2014) ‘Lexical Cohesion in academic writing’. English for Academic Purposes 23 (1) 59-63. www.onlineMET.com http://www.uefap.com/