Academic Writing for International Students of Business

(f) Clearly, you cannot deal with every aspect of the topic in an essay, so you must make clear
the boundaries of your study.

The focus will be on corporate governance in South Asian companies.

(g) Understanding the structure of your work will help the reader to follow your argument.

The paper deals with these points as follows. The first section describes the concept of serendipity

and offers a framework that integrates serendipity within the entrepreneurship literature.

The following section discusses...

3 Opening sentences

It can be difficult to start writing an essay, but especially in exams, hesitation will waste valuable
time. The first few sentences should be general but not vague, to help the reader focus on the
topic. They often have the following pattern:

1.10:Introductions and Conclusions 73

Time phrase Topic Development

Currently, marketing theory is being reassessed.

Since 2008, electric vehicles have become a serious commercialproposition.

It is important to avoid opening sentences that are overly general. Compare:

Nowadays, there is a lot of competition among different providers of

news.^7

Newspapers are currently facing strong competition from rival news

providers such as the internet and television.^3

 Write introductory sentences for three of the following titles.

(a) How important is it for companies to have women as senior managers?

(b) What are the ‘pull’ factors in international tourism?

(c) What is the relationship between inflation and unemployment?

(d) ‘Monopolies are inefficient in using resources’ – discuss.

 See Unit 2.8 Generalisations