Course: An Intermediate Guide to Writing in English for University Study

You will need to search for information for your essay. If you are on a university course, you may be given a reading list with essential or recommended reading material …

When writing an academic essay, you need to show that you have understood both the topic you are writing about and the related literature. To do this you need to …

Let’s survey a policy research brief ‘Privatising Basic Utilities in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Millennium Development Goal Impact’ from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). You can download the whole text …

Look at the essay question again. “Evaluate the success or failure of the World Bank’s approach to promoting water privatisation in the global south.” Here are some questions that you …

On this course you will focus on the different stages in the process of writing an academic essay in response to the following question: “Evaluate the success or failure of …

It is very important that you directly answer the question in an academic essay. In this video, Jonathan shows you how to analyse an essay question and understand what you …

You have reached the end of Week 1! You should now be able to identify the key features of an academic essay and understand the relationship between the essay question …

There are many endings of words (known as “suffixes”) which are associated with different parts of speech. Here are some examples: Part of Speech Suffixes Examples Nouns -ance appearance, performance, …

Watch Jonathan go through the extract from the previous Step and classify the words in groups. Did you get the word classes right? Now that you have seen an example …

To produce writing that is grammatically accurate, you need an understanding of: the ways in which we use different parts of speech (eg nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, preposition, conjunctions) …

In this video you return to the third text, which is adapted from the essay written by Patrick. Jonathan goes through the essay structure in closer detail, and explains how …

In this Step you are going to look at essay questions and how responses to these questions can be structured. Essays are written for different purposes, and the particular purpose …

In this video, Jonathan explains the typical characteristics of an academic essay. Think about the purpose and audience of an academic essay and how this influences the style and tone …

You will now look at an example characteristic of an answer to an exam question in an IELTS test. As you watch this video, again think about how the audience, …

In the next three Steps, Jonathan is going to look at the newspaper article, IELTS exam essay and an academic essay in closer detail. As you watch through these videos …