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Preface to the Third Edition

To succeed in your school, college, and university courses, you will be required to write many academic essays. Writing an academic essay is a demanding intellectual activity. You must read books and journal articles about your topic and surf the ‘Net for the best electronic sources, making careful and detailed notes as you proceed. You must analyse and synthesise these notes and from them develop a plan to guide you as you draft the paragraphs that will comprise your essay. You must write and revise your work, checking to make certain you are providing your readers with the detailed, authoritative information they expect. You must go through your paper yet again, this time proofreading and editing, correcting those errors in grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation, which can mar an otherwise solid effort.

As if all of this were not challenge enough, you then must pass along all of your hard work to someone who probably knows even more than you do about the subject of your essay and about how to express knowledge about that subject clearly, persuasively, and forcefully. Finally, you must wait, while that person judges the quality of your academic essay, and assigns to it a value, in relation to the value of similar essays written by your classmates.

The book you are holding, The Academic Essay: How to plan, draft, write and revise, will help you meet this challenge confidently and successfully. It is what you need to succeed at school and college: a step-by-step guide to writing excellent academic essays. The first four chapters explain how to gather, evaluate, organise, analyse, and synthesise the information you will need to provide content for your essay. Chapters 5 through 7 explain how to write effective introductory, body, and concluding paragraphs for academic essays. Chapters 8 through 13 teach you how to revise and edit your work, to correct errors in grammar, sentence structure, and diction. Chapter 14 explains, clearly and simply, how to acknowledge the sources you have used and chapter 15 shows you how to use all of this information to write an essay in an examination.

The Academic Essay also includes a case study of one student, Audrey, as she works her way through each component of the process of writing an essay. You will hear from Audrey and follow her along as she considers her topic, does some research, plans her essay, drafts her paragraphs, revises, edits, and compiles her source list. By watching over Audrey’s shoulder as she methodically works her way through the process of writing her essay (about the characters in Shakespeare’s sonnets), you will gain a solid understanding of what you need to do write successful essays yourself and an understanding of how you need to proceed.

The Academic Essay will, in short, teach you those skills in written composition that you will need to succeed in those many school, college, and university courses that require academic writing.

Dr Derek Soles