Academic writing guide?

[davidgillon]

Does anyone have any recommendations for a guide on how to academic writing?

My sister, as her school's SENCO*, has to do a masters level Postgraduate Certificate in SEND*  (it's a legal requirement of the job), but the guidance she's had is pretty poor, roughly "Academic writing is very different, don't use first or second person and reference everything". Sadly I'm not exaggerating how skimpy it is - I read through it on Sunday morning in under 10 minutes, though it takes a couple of pages to say what I've reduced to a sentence. (I suspect they just haven't taken account of how unsupported people are when everything's being done remotely - three online days to date - and they haven't done academic work in several decades).

Obviously a slightly more useful guide might help her get a better idea of what's expected of her. So is there anything out there? It doesn't have to be subject specific, just cover academic writing in a more useful format.

* Special Educational Needs Coordinator

** Special Educational Needs and Development

 

Comments

[slashmarks]

It depends on the field, and I think the easiest way to learn is honestly to read some papers in her field and ape that style. At the graduate level you are, ideally, turning out publishable research so you should be writing directly like published research, or a first draft of it, anyway. But that's not the same across different subjects - my linguistics writing style as an advanced undergrad doing graduate courses was very, very different from my history grad student writing style, and technical stuff like the format and information included in citations is also completely different.

If she's doing the certificate with a certain institution, at least in the US they would have a writing center or other writing tutoring services, and might have a graduate level department that can do online tutoring or similar, although their quality varies. I'd look into the school as a whole's support services for writing.

[davidgillon]

Thanks for this. It doesn't seem to be helping that the course isn't run directly through the university, but through a training company, and that that company mostly doesn't run university level courses. So every kind of help is at least one step further away than it should be *headdesk*

[slashmarks]

/facepalm Oh, jeez. Yeah, I'd say that's a warning sign for the program in general but if she's doing this for legal reasons it might not matter anyway? I'd possibly email the teacher and ask about writing support, they should know if there actually is anything available.