From Learning English, this is the Education Report.
Many secondary and university students have returned to classes, or soon will. And some of you have told us that you worry about academic writing writing for school. We know that writing papers can be hard even a little frightening. This is especially true if you are not writing in your first language.
So we have asked some writing experts in the United States for advice. From time to time as part of the Education Report, we will share some of their suggestions with you in their own words.
Today we hear from Mary Ann Allison, a professor in the journalism, media studies and public relations department at Hofstra University in New York. She is also a poet and a writer. She says starting a paper is often the most difficult part of writing for school.
Mary Ann Allison, suppose the teacher or professor gives you a choice of a topic, a subject, within a given field.
Well, I have a couple of thoughts. The first, if you have any choice at all of a topic, is to do something that youre really interested in, because the more youre interested in it naturally, the better youll write and the easier itll be.
After you have found a subject you think you would like to write about, what comes next?
Once youve decided on something, another consideration would be how much information you can find. So, often if Im starting something, Im considering a topic, I do, oh, 10, 15 minutes worth of looking at information to see if theres enough for me to be able to easily research and write what I want to write. And if theres not, then I might choose something else to write on. So those two things, I would say, sort of balance your interest and information availability. And then the next thing that I would do is what I call a back-of-the-envelope outline.
