For this week’s concept worksheet you’ll annotate a scholarly text and identify how it displays the traits of academic writing that we have studied and discussed this week.
What is an annotation? It’s a note of explanation or comment added to a text. Your instructors annotate your assignments in Canvas most weeks when they type the comments and feedback that appear on the side of your documents and papers.
Using Microsoft Word’s Comment FeatureLinks to an external site., you’ll add annotations to a scholarly text. You can also use Google Doc’s Commenting ToolsLinks to an external site., or Apple’s Pages commenting toolLinks to an external site. (All Pages documents should be saved as pdfs or docx files before submitting to Canvas!) If you’ve never used one of these tools, take some time to read through the relevant tutorial link above.
Select one of the scholarly articles below. Using comments, highlight and comment on the features of academic writing that you notice in the article. Depending on your comment, you may highlight a single word, a sentence, or a whole paragraph.
As a reminder, here are the features of academic writingLinks to an external site. that we read about this week:
Complexity
Formality
Precision
Objectivity
Explicitness
Accuracy
Hedging
Responsibility
Organization
Planning
Leave a minimum of 10 comments on the document. Don’t just identify a feature of academic writing. Explain how it is used and analyze its effect.
Your annotations should identify at least 5 of the features of academic writing listed above. You may also comment on other features of academic writing that came up in this week’s discussion.
Finally, leave one last annotation on your article that answers the following questions in no less than 100 words:
Which feature of academic writing that you identified above would you most like to work on developing in your own writing?
What benefit to you as a writer will working on this feature provide?
