APPENDICES: Academic Writing Basics
Technical Writing Essentials is designed to follow up on the skills learned in a first year Academic Writing course. If you’d like a refresher on some of the skills and ideas you learned in first year, an excellent open textbook used in some first year writing courses is Why Write? A Guide for Students in Canada (2nd Ed). In particular, Chapter 5 of this textbook discusses grammar as a situated practice, offers an excellent overview of “What is grammar?” and provides some very helpful information on “Rules for Academic Writing in English.”
The following sections provide a review of some of the basic conventions and expectations of academic writing that students should be familiar with and that are relevant to technical writing:
Appendix A: Referring to Authors and Titles
Appendix C: Writing Comparisons
Appendix D: Transitional Words and Phrases for University Writing
Appendix E: Sentence Structure
Appendix F: Punctuation Matters
