Tense use for research papers

This post is written by one of our contributors: BL. A general guideline for using tense would be this: use the tense according to the actual time of the event. It is not that simple, of course (what is?). The tenses can be mixed; it always depends on what you want to communicate to the [...]

Organizing and Synthesizing

Exercise 1 Reorganize the information about three popular tourist destinations in the U.S.A. in the table answer the questions that follow. Las Vegas New York City Orlando – Bellagio Hotel – Casinos – Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition – Cirque du Soleil shows – Nevada – Hot and dry – New York – High living expenses [...]

Conjunctive Adverbs

Comprehensive and very useful pages from Leeds, B. (2001). TWE and application essays. Korea: Academic Press.  Click on each image to enlarge. For a discussion on metalanguage (talking to the reader in your writing), go to http://eflwriting4life.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/metalanguage/ For cohesion and coherence, go to http://eflwriting4life.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/cohesion-and-coherence/

Citation Examples

Here are some examples of summarizing and paraphrasing—some are good and some are bad examples.  Read the original work and then the paraphrased versions and ask yourself these questions: Which one is a good paraphrase?  Why?  Which ones are not good and why?  The answers are provided at the end of this post.  Note that [...]

Verbs in an Academic Paper

These are verbs commonly used in the literature review section of an academic paper.  When you work on the early drafts of the paper, however, don’t pay attention to them.  For example, feel free to use “say” or “state” as many times as you want.  Then when you revise the paper, you can begin to [...]

Paraphrasing

When you paraphrase, you restate another writer/speaker’s ideas by using your own words, phrases, and sentence structure.  It is different from summarizing in that a summary is usually of the entire work (an essay, an article, or even a book), while writers usually paraphrase only a short section of a text at a time.  To [...]

Quoting

Quoting is using an author’s exact words, phrases, clauses, sentences, or longer passages with quotation marks around the text and an appropriate citation technique.  According to Leki (1998), “[w]riters quote sources … when the original wording is particularly striking or interesting, or when they want the reader to know exactly what another writer has written” [...]

Citations in Academic Writing: Introduction

The bulk of the literature review–the part where you provide the reader with background for your topic in terms of what has been done or investigated with regard to that same topic by other researchers–and parts of the discussion (the part where you make sense of the research results and compare them with other research [...]

Summary Writing

What is a summary?  Why do you have to know how to summarize?  If you’re one of the people that don’t like summary writing, honestly, I don’t blame you.  Summarizing involves much more than the ability to write.  But if you’re in the academic circle, you need to be able to do it.  If you’re [...]

Metalanguage: Talking to the Reader

I have been told by many of my students over the years that they have problems making their writing flow.  This means that they want the ideas that they put in the text run together smoothly–having a sense of cohesion and coherence (see the link at the end of this post for more explanation of [...]