This large website is essentially an online tutorial for academic writing. Their tagline is: "These tutorials will help you improve your ability to write at university, no matter what your faculty or what type of degree you're doing."
Resources for Academic Writing from Monash University ©2016
<http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/index.xml>
The website covers academic writing over a wide range. Not all the resources are directly applicable to what we are doing in Ancient Languages and her related fields. Therefore we have decided to post an annotated table of contents of the site to facilitate navigation to the most useful and important pages. The following list of headings mirrors part of the table of contents found on the site. The text in bold are the headings from the site, the remaining texts is annotations on the content of the site.
Table of contents
Writing home
General writing
Start here. Do not omit this page. The pages under this heading are the introduction to the website. Here you will find information relevant for reading and understanding the rest of the website. Read this first.
Writing in Art and Design
Researching skills for Art and Design
Writing skills for Art and Design
Visual analysis
This is an important heading for assignments involving the analysis of artworks, but is also very useful for the analysis of other kinds of visual texts, like Egyptian stele, Greek temples, or even archaeological artefacts.
Writing in Arts
The study of the Ancient World is classified under Arts. That is why you will qualify eventually as a Bachelor of Arts (Baccalaureus Artis), Master of Arts (Magister Artis) or a Doctor Philosophiae (a 'learned person of philosophy'). The Monash University does not offer courses on the ancient world per se, but our field is close enough to arts generally.
The study of the Ancient World is essentially a historical and literary field. Historical in the sense that we would like to find out what happened in the ancient past (reading of documents, artefacts, etc.) and we would like to know how important these events are (interpretation). Therefore, for your purposes, the sections on the English essay (literature) and the Historical essay (history) is important.
English essay
Lecturer's advice
An interesting and useful section mainly on what irritates lecturers when reading assignments. Here you will also find the FAQs.
Skills for writing in Literature
All of these sub-heading are very important, read them carefully. Some aspects will be more or less important for the ancient texts with which you will be working, and some sections are aimed at completing first year assignments rather than advanced papers. Use your own judgement.
Topic analysis
Structuring an argument
Focusing on the topic
Writing a qualified answer to a question
Linking main points
Interpreting texts
Narrative vs. analysis
Making judgements
Further resources for Literature
Annotated assignments
This is potentially the most useful section if you are interested in scoring good marks. However, we think that it will be worth your while only when you have taken your time to work through the examples properly.
History essay
Lecturer's advice
An extensive page and worth your while.
Skills for writing in History
The website directs you to an alternative website created by the history department. The document there, "Essay Writing Guide" is excellent. Note, however, that they use slightly different style conventions. The material found on this page does not duplicate the material on the Academic Writing site.
Making and supporting claims
The topic sentence
Supporting evidence
Focusing on primary evidence
Documenting sources with footnotes
Analysing historical arguments
Annotated assignments