A Student's Guide to Academic Writing

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A Student’s Guide to Academic Writing assists college and university students as they learn to write an academic essay in a new writing environment. Placing an emphasis on decision making and problem solving, the authors teach students to identify the writing purpose, the audience, and the decisions they need to make to both fulfill the writing purpose and satisfy the intended audience. This unique approach empowers students by teaching them the skills necessary to make effective decisions about their own writing and thus become more effective writers.

Michael O’Brien Moran has been teaching at the University of Manitoba since 1987. He has taught literature, composition, and transition year programs, and for the past four years has conducted research into both the strategies writers use to organize text and the strategies novice writers use in unfamiliar writing situations. In addition, with Karen Soiferman, he has undertaken a number of research projects to investigate the ways in which first-year college and university students approach writing assignments.

Karen Soiferman teaches in the Faculty of Education at both the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg. Her background is in Language and Literacy Education, particularly the ways in which first-year students learn to write an academic essay. During the research for her PhD, she gathered students’ perceptions of their high school writing environment and compared them to the same students’ perceptions of the university writing environment. She and her colleague Michael O’Brien Moran have also completed numerous studies on first-year writing in an effort to discover why students experience difficulty in learning to write an academic essay. As a writing instructor teaching first-year students, Karen is interested in taking the prior knowledge that students bring with them and using it as the foundation on which to build a program for writing instruction.