learn to write? or learn other things?

did it mention writing?

From Tong: This paper is and interview from the teachers who teaches academic writing to post graduate students and EFL students. It provides the teachers methods to bring up an academic piece to the students so that the student will understand the purpose of the paper. Through a series of lectures and example, the teacher works on having the student find evidence and state their point of view. It's mostly on the things that most of us should know, such as a paper should start with an introduction, have body paragraphs and conclusion and don't use the word I think, I believe etc. in an academic paper, but us quotes and supporting evidence.

Tong's post! This article is about the complication of academic writing. It identifies some of the difficulties in understanding an academic paper. Through anthropologist view they point out that academic writing are becoming more and more complex due to many reasons like the contents of the paper, the vocabularies including syntax and discourse. It mentions something that has to do with "technical and/or scientific writing" and the relation to countries that are working to "catch up". And how it would be a hard task in helping them to understand what's really being done. People were being hired to make the text more comprehensible to other readers. Academic writing is like making/ stating an idea in a complex ways by the uses of complex vocabularies. One important thing I found interesting and true for myself is the way student approach academic writing. Students only skim over articles to get a sense of what's being said rather than reading to "make use of the information." Then I thought could it be that students have to write on multiple articles and while in school we takes several classes that are not related to the same thing/topic and therefore our reading and writing are does not focus on the same genres or format.

In this space leave a 4-5 sentence summary and response to the article. Do your best to tell us not just what the article argues but how it could be useful for us in ENGL 431. Then use tags to categorize the article for us. (When you're in the blue screen, choices for tags will appear below; once published, they'll appear as gray squares above) That way, as we become more interested in particular concepts or issues, we can easily find all of the articles tagged with those specific terms.

"I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way."