,DEVELOPING YOUR ACADEMIC STYLE WRITING

INTRODUCTION Your will be assessed not on the intellectal content of your dissertation,but also on its presentation. This mean that yuor written style is incredibly important. The succses with you convey your ideas will depend significantly upon the fluidity of your prose.Writing a dissertation involves following a formula.To be sucssesful the dissertation must adhere to those accepted rules of accademic writing.A wide range of resources and guidance are avaible to help imporve accademic style. WHAT IS ACCADEMIC DISCOURSE ? Reading accademic textbooks and journal articles,attending lectures, and being fart of a student community has exposed you to a habit of writing that might be termed accdemic discourse. You will have already begun to assimilate some priciples of this into your own work.Do not be alarmed at nation of assimilation.This is not a covert ploy to enforce the rules of a language police upon your criativty, no is it about restrcting your expression, interest andunderstanding of subject.Accademic discourse is simply a construct to denote a set of norms and conventions, habits of writing, which make your work intelligible, interesting, and engaging to your reader.It assumes that writerand readers form part of a communicity and can discuss concepts and theories that can be explanined,examinied,and if necessary contested. THE PROCESS OF ACCADEMIC WRITING A student of the social sciences, your dissertation may include statistcs, graps, or other representation of data, and it may include multi-media components as well as text .However, in addition to presentation data, your aim is to persuade the reader that you have understood the orocessess of reseach and can present that reserach in clear and intelligibble manner.Key to this is the need to think of your writing in stages .For example; *First draft sketches an overview of the dissertation and breaks up the presentation of findings into approprate chapters. *Second draft revises your arguments, enhances the exposition of your thesis and begins the check for grammetical ambiguities. *Third draft coreccts punctuatio and errors in referencing in accordance with your particular course reguirements and,if necessary, re-arrange some of content. *Fourth draft clarifies any remainting arguments. The above is an indcation of the posibble stage of writing, and merly illustrates the process of reworking your essay, a task wich is often avoided, because of the time factor involved,but which is essentialif you are to producea qulity diserrtation tha does justice to your research. UNDERSTAND THE STRUCTURE OF PARAGRAPHS A paragraph tend to develop a single idea or unitof which form an essay .The dissertation is in many ways similar to an extended essay,of combined with other methods of analiysis, which bild up an incremental account of a piece of research.As with single essays written for other modules, an accademic style for paragphs in the dissertation might observe some of following

*The length of paragraph Vary the length to avoid monotony however on average you will probably find thatbetween two to three prargraphs per page is sufficienct paragraps offer naturalpauses. And very long passages threten to lose the readers attention *Write sentence with clear topics.Paragraphsoften begin by stating the topic ideas and end by linking back to the overall theme .Sometimes confusion is creted becausereference to the dissertation theme is held back until the end of a chapter,during which time the reader has lost the focus of why this particular piece of research was crucial to the study. *Write unified paragraphs.Use word and pharase to link sentence and paragraph together,such as although ,however ,in contrast.The phrases work to imply change ,to suplement,or to conclude.Be careful not use them needlessly in order to fill gaps. *Use alternatives to commun word .This is a basic principle for all of writing ,and helps to avoid monotony.The most frecquent use of this will be when using pronouns (I,he ,she,we,it,they,that) to replace the subject of sentence. ADOPTING A SUITABLE WRITING STYLE It is usuallyeasier to identify clear concise writing by looking at example of sentence which are confusing and misleading .One key area of difficultyfor student when writing accademic discourseis the use of activeand passive construction.The