Beyond Academia

Slate with drawing of graduation cap — Many students assume that concepts like effective thesis statements and the sentence, paragraph, and essay equations are specific to scholarly work only, but that is not the case. Everything we have covered in this text applies to the writing we do daily in our personal and work lives. When you compose a text, the better you understand your purpose and audience, the less likely your recipient is to respond with a “??” If you write an email to your child’s teacher about a volatile concern, the more tightly you hold to the topic sentence + evidence structure, the more likely you are to be heard well. When you compose an email of inquiry to a prospective employer, your ability to reproduce an introduction + body paragraphs + conclusion format is likely to receive a favorable response. Our brains are wired for an expected linguistic structure, and the better you hold to the simple math, the more effectively you will be able to communicate your purpose.

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The Simple Math of Writing Well Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Jennie A. Harrop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.