Summary

A summary is a condensation of main ideas in a text. It should be:

1. clear - giving explanations which could be easily understood.
2. objective - not including your personal opinions.
3. accurate - not changing the meaning of the original text.
4. balanced - not considering one idea more important than others.

The difference between a summary and a paraphrase are:

1. a summary is shorter than the original text, while a paraphrase is about the same length as the original.
2. a summary keeps the structure & content of the original text, whereas a paraphrase does not.

To write a good summary, follow these guidelines.

1. read the text and understand it well.
2. highlight the main points.
3. make notes about these main points.
4. put away the original text.
5. rewrite your own notes.
6. begin writing the summary by stating the topic sentence, giving credit to the author of the original text.
7. write the key ideas to support the topic sentence.
8. re-read your summary and check if it has included all the key ideas.
   

Paraphrase...again

A few weeks ago I administered the mid-term exam and discussed the results with you and Mr. Lalu Muhaimi. Due to time constraint, I could only present three of your works. Here are the results:

Paraphrase: Homework 2

First of all, sorry for this belated post. I should have posted the homework earlier this week.

The homework still requires you to paraphrase a text. Last time you paraphrase an excerpt from Tardy's journal article. Now you should paraphrase an excerpt from a book titled Teaching Reading Comprehension to Students with Learning Difficulties by Janette K. Klingner, Sharon Vaughn and Alison Broadman. Here are the instructions:
1. Copy the following text to your computer.
2. Paraphrase the text.
3. Write each idea using a different color so that rearranged ideas can be easily spotted.
4. Send the original text and your paraphrase by email before Friday, 12 November 2010 in a .doc file.

---

HOW DOES TEACHING VOCABULARY
FACILITATE READING COMPREHENSION?

Regardless of what you teach—math, science, history, biology, or government—one of your major responsibilities is to teach key vocabulary and concepts so that students can comprehend what they read and understand the academic language of the discipline. For example, in mathematics, the words minus, divided, and area have specific meanings that allow students to comprehend math problems. Even if students understand what the words mean generally, they will also need to learn the specific academic meaning of the words.

Paraphrase: Assignment 1

In the homework last time, you took an excerpt from Tardy's article and tried to paraphrase it. We revised the results together in the classroom and you could download them below.

Paraphrase Assignment

Paraphrase: Handout & Homework

Hola! I have a good handout published by the Academic Center of the University of Houston Voctoria. You can learn more about paraphrasing from the handout. Please click the link below if you want to download it.

Paraphrase

Now ... the homework! Please read the paper written by Christine Tardy. Select a paragraph from the article. Paraphrase the paragraph, using your own words. Submit it by Friday 22nd October 2010.

Quoting

By request from Aium, I post the slides about Quotation below. Please download them if you find them useful. :)

Slides about quotation

Semester 1 2010/2011

Welcome! From this post forward, I will use this blog to post the materials of Academic Writing 1 Class A.

I hope you find this blog useful. Good luck with writing. :)

Research questions

Next week you’re going to present your research questions so that you could get feedback from your friends.

Remember, you could find your research problems from these sources: your own experience, previous studies, and theories.

Your research problems should meet the following criteria (Jacobs, Ary, & Razavieh, 1985):
1. contributing to the body of knowledge
2. leading to further research
3. researchable
4. suitable: interesting, related to your own experience & knowledge, feasible and not time-consuming (or money-consuming, according to one of you, hee hee…)

After you find the research problems to investigate, write them into research questions. Take these two into account when writing the research questions:
1. clarity: state all concepts clearly
2. focus: limit the scope to specific questions

Good luck for this task. I look forward to seeing you presenting the research questions.

Reading Processes

You asked for the slides about reading processes that I presented in the last session. You could download it here. Please study the slides, in case they could give you some ideas about the topic of your research.

Basic Course Outline

It’s nice to see you again in the academic writing class. Hope you all spent the short break with lots of fun.

In this semester you’ll learn how to write a good proposal for your thesis, so that you’ll be better prepared in the seminar class next semester.

Please download the BCO of this course here.