Mastering Academic Writing: Essential Skills for University Success

Abstract

Academic Writing Academic writing is very helpful for people who want to achieve success in their life. Improving once writing skills essential for everyone before entering the university. Those students who have studied academic writing in high school for example in MLA and APA are more likely to get high score compared to those who have not. Academic wring also serves as a tool of communication and will help me convey the required information based on my field of study. My past experience with the academic writing course has improved my skills in academic and formal essay writing. I have encountered the rules of developing a good essay and expressing my ideas clearly and formally to the audience. Additionally, I have learnt to review the works of others and help to improve on their skills in writing good essays and meeting the expectations of the audience. This course has improved my capacity to express my ideas and identify the issues that other writers and film producers intend to address. Moreover, I have learnt to apply the modes of persuasion, ethos, logos, and pathos, as they were critical aspects that we covered in this course. The course included choosing and addressing an issue through a proposal for changes. We learnt to identify different types of essays in the course including the academic essays, reviews, and visual analysis essays. The academic essay contains the basic format of formal essay writing while review essays included the analysis of the modes of persuasion in works of art. We did the visual analysis essay when analyzing the advertisement to understand the aspects of culture demonstrated in pictures. This course has enhanced my personal skills and understanding on academic essay writing. My past experience in academic writing was, moreover, critical and helped me acquire many things including enhancing my skills in reading and obtaining information from the work presented by my peers in class. Enhancing the writing skills includes being capable of coming up with ideas and presenting them in a manner that the audience gets the facts behind the thesis. Moreover, one has to clearly separate and acknowledge the work of other authors when presenting a formal essay. The writing experience has enhanced my capacity to express myself clearly and allow the audience to identify my ideas and views from the facts obtained from secondary sources. Referencing and citing the work of others is essential as the audience may be interested in conducting more research on the topics that I present in the articles. Through this course, I have observed the essence of reading and presenting factual information to improve the quality of the essays I present and inform my audience on the research done in the past. The reading exercises were, moreover, essential in improving my capacity to learn from the methods or research applied in the past and their capacity to work in my research. The process of acquisition of facts involves selecting the most appropriate method to search for information and managing the cost of collecting the information. This experience was critical in enhancing my experience with the work we read in class and the other research articles that I may access in the future. The academic writing, I have learnt is similar to what I expect to learn in this semester. First, in both cases the skills learnt will help students in both academic activities and in the professional world to...