Exploring Academic Writing in my Discipline

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Section 1: Course writing

The main writing categories in my research field are presentation, research paper, paper’s review, application letter for a grant and a book. These categorized literatures include many subcategories: the writing style is changed based on the audience. When a researcher presents his/her results to the general audience, he/her will change his writing style according to its knowledge and familiarity to the topic. Also, we can find similar practice in other types of writings, except for research paper. In general, research papers are written for submission to the journals, so their writing style should be specialized for those who have interest and general knowledge in the field, and precise in their terminology. Thus, the writing assignments required for my classes have been often arranged for building required basic knowledge in the field, reasonable flow in writing and fluency in terminology.

Practical writing assignments in the classes that I am currently taking and will take in the future are as following: in the Fisheries Science class (Zool466), I am required to write a research paper about ecology of the species, history of the fisheries, trends in the fishery and the situation in the past, present, and potential future management of the fishery. This assignment is arranged to enhance my ability to become familiar with a particular fishery, hone my research and writing skill, as well as apply concepts and frameworks developed in the class to solve the real-world situations in the fishery industry (Guide handout of Zool466 class, 2010 SPRING). In another class, Political Geography of Oceans (GEOG435), I am required to make presentation twice during the semester which will make me familiar with and...

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...eral features of species etc. Then, they review the topic with thorough and more detailed information possibly from present literatures about the topic. Next, they designate the problem and controversial issues. In conclusion, they state expectations for resolving the problem and improving discussion. Discussion type’s articles have similar composition with Review-type articles except for they do not need to summarize everything in the topic. Moreover, this type of articles tends to be convenient to express the author’s view due to its subjective writing style. However, this type of papers has been providing great opportunities to enhance communications among researchers. One can understand what the “hot” topics in the research field are through reading excellent opinions to the topic by various researchers and contradictions for the papers from other scientists.

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