Academic Writing

FIRST PRIZE 'The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.'   Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, in an article entitled Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time, published in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997)

SECOND PRIZE   'If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalise' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.' Homi K Bhabha, professor of English at the University of Chicago, in his book The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994)

THIRD PRIZE 'As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet's work of 'les noms du père', a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus ('Les Non-dupes errent'), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomeno-logically irreducible dyad of the mother and child'   Steven Z Levine in Twelve Views of Manet's Bar (Princeton UP, 1996)

Academic Writing Style Layout Paragraphs Cohesion

Style be concise don’t use contractions avoid padding don’t use contractions don’t use colloquial language/slang/dialect generally avoid phrasal verbs use complete sentences organise your ideas into paragraphs

Sentence Fragments  Common problem = sentence fragments….  a punctuation problem?  Shane always teaches in WT105. Because he likes to play with the whiteboard.    The committee has decided that as Alex never uses powerpoint. Her laptop should be confiscated.

Layout what needs to go where would subheadings help the reader? ordering of paragraphs…

Paragraphs      What is a paragraph? a unit of writing that develops a new idea or aspect of your argument How long should it be? 5 – 8 sentences???? enough to develop a point How does it develop a point? topic sentence evidence evaluation, analysis, examination, comparison, contrast Implications links to other paragraphs

Cohesion Use transitions words to give your reader ‘verbal signposts’ Listing first, second, third, to begin, to conclude Re-inforcement also, furthermore, what is more, above all, in the same way Similarity equally??? Giving examples for instance, in other words, that is… Result/consequence so, therefore, consequently,thus, hence

Generalising on the whole, as a rule, in most cases Highlighting in particular,especially, mainly Transition to a new point it follows that, turning to, as for… Contrast instead, conversely, in contrast, on the contrary   deduction, summary, concession, expressing alternatives……