APPENDICES: Academic Writing Basics

Technical Writing Essentials is designed to follow up on the skills learned in a first year Academic Writing course. If you’d like a refresher on some of the skills and ideas you learned in first year, an excellent open textbook used in some first year writing courses is Why Write? A Guide for Students in Canada (opens in a new window). In particular, Chapter 5 of this textbook discusses grammar as a situated practice (opens in a new window), offers an excellent overview of “What is grammar?” (opens in a new window) and provides some very helpful information on “Rules for Academic Writing in English” (opens in a new window).

The following sections provide a review of some of the basic conventions and expectations of academic writing that students should be familiar with and that are relevant to technical writing:

Appendix A:  Referring to Authors and Titles (opens in a new window) 

Appendix B:  Writing Summaries(opens in a new window) 

Appendix C:  Integrating Quotations, Paraphrases and Summaries into your Writing(opens in a new window) 

Appendix D:  Transitional Words and Phrases for University Writing(opens in a new window) 

Appendix E:  Sentence Structure (opens in a new window)

Appendix F:  Punctuation Matters (opens in a new window)

Appendix G:  Writing Comparisons (opens in a new window)

Appendix H:  Peer Review Essentials (opens in a new window)