Audience: For whom am I writing?

At university, your teachers are your primary audience.
Other potential readers are your peers.

 Your readers will look at your work critically.
They will expect your writing to display depth of understanding and breadth of reading.
Your readers, especially your teacher, will be familiar with the subject, but they will want
to see how well you

• have understood the topic or problem
• can argue or present your case in writing

So, during the planning stage it makes sense to ask:

• Who is my audience?
• What does my audience know?
• What do I need to tell these readers?

Purpose: What am I trying to accomplish?

Everything you write should have a clear purpose. The purpose will:

• guide your selection and collection of data, whether literature, interview material, or statistics
• give unity to your writing

Most of the texts you need to write will have these characteristics:

• Analysis and Exposition
• Argument
• Conclusions and Recommendations

Analysis and Exposition

Analysis demonstrates clarity of thinking, and the ability to break a subject down into its component parts.

Exposition refers to the ability to lay out information in a report in a clear manner. You can do this by describing, explaining, or giving examples.

Argument

You write to convince a specific audience of your standpoint.

University audiences are often divided in their views and are critical readers.

It is important to present and defend your argument well.

You will be expected to

• offer a balanced analysis and evaluation of the pros and cons of a position
• take a position and argue why that position is applicable to the target social situation or context

Conclusions and Recommendations

Your text should also provide the reader with a summary of your main findings or conclusions.

In investigative reports, you should make recommendations for action or further research.

Academic essays and reports provide practice in the skills required in the outside, professional world.

In a professional context, once you have drawn your conclusions from your findings, you will be expected to come up with recommendations for the decision-making process. 

Context: What is my communicative context ?

Here is an excerpt from a booklet from the Australian Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture, which signals the value of all forms of language, not only the academic, and the need to respect diverse ways of speaking, writing and hearing:

Informal, conversational language now has a critical role to play in the making of organisational culture. With teamwork, technical communication now needs to be closely related to personal and group communication. Consultative committees and team meetings require oral and written communication skills, and all communication has to be sensitive to different ways of speaking and different ways of hearing: differences among the members of the organisation, and among its clients [CWCC (NLLIA) Brochure, 1994]

The focus of this CRM-Online program is academic writing. Its full context is the range of language use and diversity found both within the university and in the professional workplace.

How will your writing be judged ?

Writing competence is judged by a range of factors which, considered together, form an overall impression. This is referred to as impression marking.

Teachers often match students against proficiency profiles they have built up through experience and from working with colleagues in a particular program.

They will then weight their assessment towards specific skills they have covered in the course.

Here are some grade profiles

• They have been adapted to reflect general standards for first-year writing in social sciences and humanities in Hong Kong’s universities. They correspond closely to an international set of profiles drawn up for the TOEFL test, a higher standard than Hong Kong Use of English.

• The profiles are equivalent to those applied by TOEFL for overseas students wishing to study at an American University. Generally, that minimum standard will be a grade 5 (TOEFL equivalent band: 500), which equates with a B grade (though possibly not B-) on HKU English Centre assignments.

• This framework gives an idea of how your all-round academic writing ability is assessed.

• Although compiled to apply to essay-type assignments, they would also apply to longer, report-type texts.

Profiles for Assessing Academic Writing