ATS1297: Academic Writing

5 x Quizzes worth 20%, 3 writing tasks: 10% Opinion/Position piece, 25% Short practice essay (1500 words), 40% Final essay (2000 words)

Guess you can say it's one of those GPA booster units, if you're looking for a unit with low contact hours, no exams and don't mind bullshitting through assignments then this is the unit. Also, It's great for first year students, as we get a feel of what university essays are like. There are weeks where the unit emphasizes on what types of evidence/sources are best to use in your essays, plagiarism, structure, paraphrasing and referencing. Those are honestly the things i found useful in this unit. For our assignments, we focus on the topic of "moral panic". In the first assignment, you write an opinion piece on a topic and if it's an example of a moral panic then you write a revised academic version of the opinion piece, to test if you understand the different elements in the two styles of writing. The short practice essay was in preparation for the final essay in which we were given a topic related to moral panic and had to write with all the elements of a academic essay. The final essay was similar to the short practice essay but the word limit is higher and we had the freedom to choose our own topic. 4 Quizzes were done online about every 2 weeks, they were mostly based on readings and lecture slides, i highly recommend the textbook for quizzes and in class activities, but it's not worth buying imo, so borrow it from the library before a quiz or something. The last quiz was an in class test done in Week 10, much harder than the online quizzes but i found the tutors to be fairly easy markers. The 5% participation grade was said to encourage involvement in class discussions in tutes but honestly, you automatically get a HD for showing up in more than 90% of the tutes. I barely went to any lectures, they weren't too necessary but Andrew was a great lecturer/co-ordinator of unit, understands that we have a lot on our plate late in the semester and extends due dates generously!Overall, a chill unit but didn't enjoy the topic they chose for us for the first 2 assignments and unit can get daunting when you're learning about grammar and punctuation.

Dr Andrew Johnson

No exam

3 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

Jean Brick's "Academic culture: a student's guide to studying at university".

Semester 1, 2015

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