Writting Skills

Notes on writing skills

Dr. Evangelia Baralou

Contents

1. The skill of writing 3

2. Thesis statement 3

3. Prewriting techniques 3

4. The structure of a paragraph 3

5. Editing and revising 4

6. Writing a report 4

7. Collecting secondary data 5

8. Presenting secondary data – avoiding plagiarism 5

9. Producing a bibliography 7

10. Turnitin 9

11. References 10

1. The skill of writing

Writing is a skill, not a natural gift, therefore it can be taught and learnt. This course helps students acquire new writing skills or advance existing ones. In order to write effectively, one needs to follow a systematic process of concrete steps. The first step would be to find out what the assignment is about and create an outline that will help to clarify and organize initial thoughts and relevant material. The language used should be relevant to the target audience. For an academic piece of work, we need to be able to provide evidence of critical reading and writing to convince the reader who would be knowledgeable on the topic. The purpose of writing might be to summarize a story, to argue for or against something, to analyze and/or synthesize views, to debate on a topic.

2. Thesis statement

The first step in the process of writing...