Introduction to Academic and Policy Paper Writing

This course will cover a broad range of topics that are intended to help students become more confident and effective writers and to lay the groundwork for future study. The course begins with sentence diagramming, which is a visual representation of a sentence’s structure; this part of the course provides students with a deeper understanding of grammatical structures. We will then move onto a study of the LaTeX typesetting software, which is the preeminent tool used by academics to produce professional-looking documents; this part of the course will provide students with the necessary tools to produce academic-oriented papers and presentations. This is followed by a single lecture on punctuation, which provides an overview of their nuanced use. The final topic is on writing clearly; the first ten lectures of this course focus on the “technical” aspects of writing,” while the next two will focus on “style”: we will discuss ways to effectively edit your writing, create interesting and easy-to-understand sentences, and group sentences together effectively.