Developing Academic Writing Skills

• You can help to improve your students’ writing skills by focusing on writing when you are working on other skill areas. For example, when looking at a reading passage, encourage your students to notice how the text or the argument has been organised. You can point out new vocabulary and focus on cohesion or referencing. This will help to make your course a truly integrated one. When you are working on listening and speaking skills, you can draw your students’ attention to the difference in style between the spoken and the written form of the language.
• It also helps to vary the focus of your writing lessons. You may want to focus on any of the following areas at different times: fluency in writing; accuracy in writing; using new vocabulary; paragraphing; introductions and conclusions; organising your ideas; planning an essay; using the correct style; checking and correcting your own work.
• Another way to vary the focus of your lessons is to achieve a balance between i) writing at the sentence level, ii) paragraph building and iii) producing whole texts. Train your students to actively participate in their own learning by telling them which areas they will be working on and why. Point out what they can gain from practising a particular activity.

What are the main skills these two kinds of writing require?

1. General writing skills

• Matching the piece of writing to its audience and purpose
• Structuring writing
• Coherence and cohesion
• Clarity of expression
• Accuracy of language

2. Skills specific to Task 1

• Choosing the most relevant information
• Organising information
• Describing data correctly and clearly
• Writing in the correct style and register

3.	Skills specific to Task 2
	Following discursive writing conventions:

• Appropriate style
• Appropriate order of information

What do the above terms mean? Try to define them yourself, then read the definitions below.

Matching the piece of writing to its audience and purpose
All writing is written for a reason and to a particular audience.
Your reason for writing influences what you write (e.g. an email or a letter or a report): the contents and style.

Your audience also influences the contents of what you write and the style in which you write.

Structure of writing
Different kinds of writing follow different conventions for the order in which they structure information (For example, introduction → body → conclusion in essays).
Structure is also given to a piece of writing through the use of paragraphs, topic sentences and signalling phrases.

We use paragraphs to signal that we, the writer, are moving on to a new point or new type of information. Paragraphs help the reader to understand our message because they show that one point has ended and another is just beginning. It is also much easier to read small chunks of text than long, continuous ones.

Topic sentences contain the theme of the paragraph. They make the theme of the paragraph clear to the reader and so help to give the text coherence. The rest of the paragraph is usually elaboration and/or exemplification of the theme.

Signalling phrases are phrases we include in our writing (and speaking) to signal to the reader what we are going to talk about next e.g. I’d now like to discuss the advantages ...; my second argument against this statement is ...; finally I would like to ... They are used particularly in longer and more formal kinds of writing.

Coherence and cohesion
Coherence involves following expected sequences of discourse e.g. a greeting is usually followed by a greeting in spoken language, or in essay writing the introduction is followed by the body then the conclusion. This linking is achieved through using our shared knowledge of these conventions and our knowledge of the world rather than through explicit language linkers. Relevance and comprehensiveness of ideas are further examples of coherence.

Cohesion involves using language to mark the links in a stretch of text. Examples of cohesive devices are conjunctions, pronouns, lexical sets, articles, possessive adjectives e.g. in the sentences ‘The girl left the room. This surprised her friend’, ‘This’ is a pronoun linking back to the whole of the previous sentence, and ‘her’ is a possessive adjective linking back to ‘the girl’.

Clarity of expression
Expressing yourself clearly involves using language accurately and with an appropriate range, writing coherently and cohesively, following the conventions of the particular kind of writing (e.g. a letter or an essay), and writing relevantly and comprehensively.

Accuracy of language
This means using the correct forms of language i.e. language which contains no mistakes of grammar, punctuation, spelling or vocabulary use.

Report Writing for IELTS Academic Writing Task 1

• Comprehension of data – make sure you spend a couple of minutes at the beginning of the text examining the data to make sure you understand it. You cannot describe it if you don’t understand what it is trying to convey to you.
• Choosing data – make sure that you have included a summary of the trends that are apparent in the data as well as giving detailed information.
• Organising the report – make sure that you present your report in an organised manner so that the reader can easily follow what you want to say.
• Appropriate style – make sure your style is neutral and unbiased.

Discursive writing conventions for IELTS Academic Writing Task 2

• Appropriate style – in discursive writing this is usually a neutral or slightly formal style of writing.
• Appropriate order of information – essays in English follow the pattern of introduction → body → conclusion. There are also common patterns within the body of the writing. The pattern used depends on the kind of discursive writing (e.g. discussing advantages and disadvantages, evaluating evidence, giving your opinion).