Introduction to the Academic Writing Guide
The Academic Writing Guide (AWG) is designed to familiarise you with the process of writing a discursive essay. A discursive essay is a genre of writing that requires you to investigate a topic; collect, generate, and evaluate evidence; and establish a position on the topic in a concise manner. Once you have decided on your position your writing will be an attempt to persuade your reader that it is a reasonable one to take.
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The pages in this guide will present information and activities designed to help you develop the skill of argumentation, which as well as being the main feature of discursive writing, underpins every aspect of university study.
Throughout the AWG you will follow a writer developing a discursive essay and will be offered a range of examples and practice activities to exemplify each stage of the pre-writing and drafting stages. If you are using the AWG to help you research and write a discursive essay of your own, you can apply the information and skills that you gain to do that.
Discursive Essay Writing
Academic writing does not aim simply to describe (although describing will be part of the process). An essay that is too descriptive won’t receive a very high mark at university level. Similarly, an essay that takes a ‘balanced’ view and does little more that weigh up the pros and cons of each side of an argument is rarely appropriate for university-level study.
Your aim in writing a discursive essay is to persuade your reader that your position on a topic (your argument) is a valid one. In it you make a claim about a topic and defend this claim with evidence. A discursive essay must therefore begin with a thesis or claim that is debatable. In other words, the thesis must be something that people could reasonably have differing opinions on. If your thesis is something that is generally agreed upon or accepted as fact, then there is no reason to try to persuade your reader of its merits.
Summary
Without re-reading the section above, can you summarise what a discursive essay is? Hover over the box to see if you are right.
Discursive writing
A discursive essay is a genre of writing that asks you to investigate a topic; to gather, read and evaluate evidence; and to present a position on your topic based on the evidence gathered. The structure of a discursive essay is held together with a thesis statement which outlines your argument or your position on the topic. The key aim of a discursive essay is to convince your reader that the argument that you're presenting is a valid one.
TASK
For an essay with the title ‘Evaluate the effects of telecommuting on family life’ which of the following thesis statements is a debatable claim (i.e. a claim that people could disagree with)?
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Telecommuting is the process of using telecommunications tools to work from home.This thesis is not debateable. It is a definition of the term telecommuting.
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Telecommuting has a positive effect on family life to a large extent, due to the flexibility of working arrangements and the ability to spend more time in the family home.This is a debatable thesis because reasonable people could disagree with it. Some people could argue that telecommuting has a negative impact on family life – if people are working in cramped conditions, or have to share computers, or are trying to manage childcare at the same time, for example.
THE PRE-WRITING STAGE
There is a lot of pre-writing work to do for a discursive essay. Before you can begin writing you need to:
decide on your purpose in writing
read/gather evidence
interpret evidence
weigh evidence
make evidence-based decisions
develop a thesis/argument based on what you have discovered
re-read/find further evidence to support your argument
You will find out how to carry out these pre-writing tasks in Stages 1 and 2 of the Academic Writing Guide, and in stage 3 you will find out about the process of writing the first draft of an essay.