What is the difference between a persuasive and an informative essay?2 2 How can you generate ideas for an academic essay?
Discussion points
1 1 Why is profiling your reader an important and useful pre-writing activity?
2 2 Why is determining your purpose an important and useful pre-writing activity?
3 3 What are the benefits of freewriting?
Practical assignment
1 1 Select a popular magazine you read on a fairly regular basis. Describe in writing the target audience of this magazine. By examining the articles, the advertisements, and the letters to the editor, you should get a good idea as to the type of reader the magazine appeals to.
Study and revision tips
1 1 Keep the needs and expectations of your reader in mind throughout the writing process, not just before you begin to write.
2 2 Freewriting can be used at any time during the writing process, especially if you feel you are beginning to suffer from writer’s block.
3 3 Writers often alter or even change completely their thesis statement at different stages of the writing process.
2Researching Your Topic
One-minute overview: In Chapter One, you learned how important it is to consider the needs of your reader, determine your purpose, and think about your topic before you begin a draft of your essay. These exercises will help get you started and provide you with some focus. After you have thought about your topic, you must find out as much as you can about what the experts have to say. An academic essay demands research. Research will provide you with much of the information you will need, in order to develop the ideas you present in your essay. Research also lends that aura of authority to your work, which your professor will expect. There are basically three sources of information you will need to access in order to research your topic completely. They are:
Books
Periodicals
The internet
Finding the right books
To find book titles which will provide some of the information you will need to discover and develop the ideas you will present in your essay, check your course outline to see if your professor has included a bibliography or a list of further readings relevant to the course material. If he or she has, and if the list includes a title that sounds like it is relevant to your topic, do all you can to find the book and see if it contains relevant information. Study also any bibliographies or lists of further or related readings at the end of text-book chapters or at the end of the text book itself. Most text books contain bibliographies and they are invaluable sources of potentially useful information.
Assuming you have found from your course outline or your text book, a list of a dozen or so promising titles, go to your library and check your card catalogue to see if your library has the books and if they are available. Almost all university libraries are computerised now, so you must go to a terminal (usually located throughout the library) and follow the instructions (which should be close by) on how to find out if your library has the book you need. The process usually involves typing in the author’s name and the title. If your library has the book, the computer screen will tell you where in the library the book is located by providing you with a call number. The call number is a series of letters and numbers indicating where, in the library, the book is stored. If, for example, the call number is PE 1471. S65 1997, you find the book shelf with the PE label on it and move down the aisle until you find your number. The screen will also tell you whether or not the book is in or has been signed out, and, if it has been signed out, when it is due back. If it is not due back for a long period of time, you can usually put a recall on it and get it sooner.
If you have not found any specific titles from course outlines or text-book bibliographies, you will have to do a search by subject. Instead of typing author’s names and book titles into the library computer, try typing in various versions of the subject of your essay. If, for example, you were taking a music history course and had to write an essay on the English madrigal, type in the word ‘madrigal’ as a subject search and you are bound to get some leads. You can also type in a name as a subject, so for your madrigal essay you could find sources by typing in the names ‘Orlando Gibbons,’ ‘Thomas Weelkes,’ or other English madrigal composers, not as authors’ names but as subjects. Begin by making your subject search as specific as possible so that you get the most relevant information. Avoid making your search too broad because you will be overwhelmed by the number of books you can access.
Remember, as well, to check reference books such as encyclopaedias and biographical and other specialised dictionaries. Such books are useful if you need an overview of your topic. In the 1997 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, has a seven-paragraph history of the Madrigal, tracing it origins in fourteenth century Italy, and describing its popularity in sixteenth-century England.
Finally, you can might check theses and dissertations, which are lengthy studies carried out by university students, as part of their requirements to obtain an advanced degree. Theses and dissertations are vetted by experts, usually a team of the students’ professors, so they are reliable and authoritative, and are often excellent, readable sources for undergraduates working on a writing assignment. To access a theses or a dissertation, go to:
<http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0035.html>
Checking periodicals
Periodicals are texts published at regular intervals: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. They include newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Some periodicals are aimed at the general reader; some are aimed at readers interested in a specific topic or academic discipline. There are thousands of them, at least one about any topic you can imagine.
Journals are invaluable sources of information for your academic essays. The advantage they have over books is their currency. Because they are published so regularly, the information in them is usually up to date.
To find a journal article, which will provide you with information you might be able to use in an academic essay, you need to access a periodical index. Periodical indexes are available in print but the print versions are being superseded by their on-line siblings.
There should be, on the menu of the computer screen in your college library, a list of the periodical indexes available. The computer in my university library, for example, lists these Indexes: Applied Science and Technology, Art, General Science, Humanities, Reader’s Guide, and Social Sciences. To find information about madrigals, I called up the Humanities Index and typed the word ‘madrigal’ on the subject line. On my screen appeared twenty-six titles, including ‘Filippo Storzzi and the Early Madrigals,’ ‘Thomas Morley and the Italian Madrigal Tradition,’ and ‘Thomas Weelkes Borrowings from Salamone Rossi.’ I called up the last of these and found out that the article was written by Judith Cohen and that it appeared on pages 110 to 117 of the April, 1985, volume 66 issue of the journal Music and Letters. I returned then to the main menu, typed in the journal title, and learned that the call number for this journal is ML5. M64.
With the call number, of course, you can find your journal the same way you would find a book, in the library
