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Preparation work for live session
Preparation work for live session
In this session we're going to look at the idea of 'authorial voice': how do you add your own ideas and personality into a piece of academic writing? So far, we've looked a lot at supporting your work with the idea from other people, but it's equally important that your voice is also present so that your work says something original and interesting.
One way of developing our own authorial voice, is to practice identifying and using evaluative language. We started to look at this last term when we read editorial and opinion articles.
Live session discussion - task review
Live session discussion - task review
On page 1 of the preparation materials we looked at near-synonyms, where the meaning is similar but the evaluation is either positive or negative, e.g. two people might describe lying on a beach as relaxing or boring, depending on their view. Can you think of any other pairs of words like this?
Which of the excerpts from page 2 did you identify as containing Rosling's own evaluation?
Which of the example paragraphs from page 4 was the best example of evaluative writing?
The exercise on page 5 was similar, but this time it looks for a distinctive authorial voice. Which of the two paragraphs did you think achieved this?
Live session - critical discussion
Live session - critical discussion
In last week's reading class, we looked at the question: To what extent can a tax on unhealthy food can help reduce diseases related to obesity?
What was your stance on this issue and which of the texts did you find most persuasive?
Would an unhealthy food tax be popular or effective in your country?
What, in your opinion, is the biggest problem caused by the obesity crisis?
Task five - writing a critical paragraph
Task five - writing a critical paragraph
Use the four texts to create a paragraph similar to the one we looked at on page 5 of the preparation materials.
Make sure the topic and concluding sentences have a clear authorial voice. In other words, say something evaluative about the information you're reporting.
Utilise language such as hedging, attitudinal adverbs and the language of opinion that we looked at last term.
Informal, spoken language is often very evaluative. We tend to give our stance on topics much more readily when chatting with friends (who aren't marking our claims!). Here are some more examples and exercises of evaluation in colloquial language.
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