Making Your Voice Clear In Academic Writing

Lecturers often tell students that they do not want to know their opinion. But when the student hands a piece of work in, the lecturers say things such as: you haven’t answered the question, you’ve only summarised facts, what are you trying to say? etc. We need to make a distinction between a student’s uniformed, unsubstantiated opinion and the conclusions that they themselves have come to from their reading and research, what we can call their voice. This must be made clear in their writing

Rhetorical Functions in Academic Writing: Defining

Rhetorical functions in academic writing: Definin

Mapping the maze of assessment

This article presents the results of a preliminary survey of assessment tasks undertaken by students in higher education at a particular university. A key premise of the study was that the ability to handle assessment is central to the development of academic and professional literacy. Much of the current literature on assessment demonstrates a concern that it is not currently achieving this end. A grid of various features of assessment has been developed, onto which are mapped tasks used at all levels and within all disciplines in the institution. Considerable differences in the type and range of assessment tasks used across schools and disciplines are identified, and also a gap between the variation in tasks and the relatively narrow range of activities and techniques covered in most study skills manuals. It is argued that generic materials should broaden their base and that subject-specific material needs to be developed to accommodate the realities of lifelong learning

Understanding Essay Questions

Understanding Essay Question

Essay Writing process

The process of writing an essa

Using multi-criteria analysis to evaluate the feasibility of Renewable Energy Technologies and sites - the Data4Sustain Web GIS decision support tool

Developing renewable energy supplies face numerous barriers: finance; planning, viability constraints; many technologies; complexity of assessing feasibility; changing policy drivers. Therefore, a renewable energy decision-support tool is needed to systematically identify: constraints impeding / preventing development; feasible and / or priority technologies; integration with infrastructure. Data4Sustain’s Web GIS delineates potential resource and constraints to produce combined feasibility maps, integrating up to 100 data sets, using multi-criteria decision analysis. Resource, Constraint and Feasibility maps across multiple technologies (GSHP, WSHP, Solar Farms, Small and Large Wind, Small Hydro) are integrated into the Web GIS, from which users can export site reports

Long-term climate change commitment and reversibility: an EMIC intercomparison

This paper summarizes the results of an intercomparison project with Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs) undertaken in support of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). The focus is on long-term climate projections designed to: (i) quantify the climate change commitment of different radiative forcing trajectories, and (ii) explore the extent to which climate change is reversible on human timescales. All commitment simulations follow the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and their extensions to 2300. Most EMICs simulate substantial surface air temperature and thermosteric sea level rise commitment following stabilization of the atmospheric composition at year-2300 levels. The meridional overturning circulation (MOC) is weakened temporarily and recovers to near pre-industrial values in most models for RCPs 2.6–6.0. The MOC weakening is more persistent for RCP 8.5. Elimination of anthropogenic CO2 emissions after 2300 results in slowly decreasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. At year 3000 atmospheric CO2 is still at more than half its year-2300 level in all EMICs for RCPs 4.5–8.5. Surface air temperature remains constant or decreases slightly and thermosteric sea level rise continues for centuries after elimination of CO2 emissions in all EMICs. Restoration of atmospheric CO2 from RCP to pre-industrial levels over 100–1000 years requires large artificial removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and does not result in the simultaneous return to pre-industrial climate conditions, as surface air temperature and sea level response exhibit a substantial time lag relative to atmospheric CO2

Linking ideas: signalling

A website to practice the use of signalling phrases to maximise cohesion and flow in written work