Academic Writing for International Students of Business

Overgeneralising This means making statements that are too simple or inaccurate. For example, using income figures from the tabl ...

(a) ___ (b) ___ (c) ___ (d) ___ (e) ___ Building on generalisations Most essays move from the general to the specific, as a gene ...

Active and passive  Compare these two sentences: The company was founded in 1925 by Walter Trimble.(passive) Walter Trimble fou ...

2 Structure All passive structures have two parts: 2.9:Passives 125 Form of the verb to be Past participle is constructed was de ...

5 Practice B  List the passives in the table opposite. Decide if the active could be used instead, and rewrite it if so. (c) Th ...

2.9:Passives 127 In 1889, he was introduced to Florence Rowe, the daughter of a bookseller, while on holiday. After they were ma ...

1 Paragraph structure  Study the organisation of the following paragraph: Problems and Solutions UNIT 2.10 Writing tasks freque ...

2 Alternative conclusion The same ideas could be reordered to arrive at a different conclusion: 2.10:Problems and Solutions 129 ...

3 Practice A  Analyse the following paragraph in a similar way: 130 Part 2: Elements of Writing MANAGING TOURISM GROWTH Many de ...

the team faced six issues... This was rectified/solvedby... our principal worry/dilemmawas... 5 Practice B  Write a paragraph t ...

1 Capital letters It is difficult to give precise rules about the use of capital letters in modern English, where there is a tre ...

2 Apostrophes (‘) These are one of the most confusing features of English punctuation. They are mainly used in two situations: ( ...

5 Commas (,) These are one of the most common punctuation marks, but also the hardest to provide guidance for, since comma use i ...

(c) In references, quotation marks are used for the names of articles and chapters, but book or journal titles normally use ital ...

(d) three departments law business and economics have had their funding cut (e) as cammack 1994 points out latin america is crea ...

1 Five areas of difficulty  Find the mistake in each sentence and correct it. (a) The proposal has both advantages and disadvan ...

(iv) ‘Each/every’ are followed by singular noun and verb forms: Every student gets financial support. (v) Two linked nouns shoul ...

education progress vocabulary equipment research weather furniture rubbish work NB: Many of these can be ‘counted’ by using an e ...

(f) She had little interest/few interestsoutside her work. (g) The insurance policy excludes the effects of civil war/wars. (h) ...

1 Components of academic style  Study this paragraph and underline any examples of poor style. How to make people work harder i ...