1. Dilum Bandara Dilum.Bandara@uom.lk Some slides extracted from Academic Writing by Liv Jonassen & Elizabeth Tomchak, Robot Gordon Univerity and Daniel Ringold (Senior Fellow, Fulbright)

2. 2 3. It is widely believed that the climate is deteriorating. It is claimed that this process has been continuing for nearly 100 years. This belief appears to be supported by McKinley (1997), who shows a 55% increase in the frequency of severe winter gales since 1905 hey! :-) wots up? u going 2 da party 2night? hope 2 c u there. have a gud day!! :P 3 4. Precise Impersonal (Semi)formal No contractions Objective Complete sentences General Personal Informal Contractions Subjective (opinions) Fragments Emotions 4 5. Substance of academic writing must be based on solid evidence & logical analysis, & presented as a concise, accurate argument Academic writing can allow you to present your argument & analysis accurately & concisely 5 6. Language has to be clear, concise, & neutral Material is to be well researched Appropriate theories should be used It should be supported by relevant literature All literature should be correctly acknowledged 6 7. Aim for precision Dont use unnecessary words or waffle Get straight to the point Make every word count If there is any uncertainty about a particular point, use cautious language e.g., may, might, could, potentially Unless you are a confident writer, best to avoid over-long sentences Aim for a mixture of long & short sentences for variation & rhythm Avoid repeating same words 7 8. Avoid overly elaborate language Use simple words in place of obscure words that have same meaning Use of overly elaborate language can make your writing seem pretentious Use technical language & words specific to your discipline where appropriate Avoid vague terms A nice addition, very high overhead, ever-large data sets 8 9. During last decade, large-scale scientific computing plays a major role in High Performance Computing (HPC). The absolute objective of todays technology is to evaluate ever-large data sets and run ever-larger simulations has diverted the scale of high performance computers from thousand to many thousands of processors. As its widest classification, HPC is describe as which facilitate difficult computer applications that handle large-scale data sets and experience parallelism on a large scale. Since computational power is incredibly expansion, becoming faster, more creative and more commercial during the time, the user requirements and application capacity is also increases 9 10. Typical write up A lot of people think that the weather is getting worse. They say that this has been going on for quite a long time. I think that they are right. Research shows that we now get storms, etc. all the time. Revised Version It is widely believed that the climate is deteriorating. It is claimed that this process has been continuing for nearly 100 years. This belief appears to be supported by McKinley (1997), who shows a 55% increase in the frequency of severe winter gales since 1905. 10 11. Sadly, serious crime like murder is going up. Serious crime, such as murder, is increasing. You cant always trust the numbers in that report. The figures in that report are not reliable. The second thing is that most kids in that district will become criminals. The second factor is that the majority of children in that district may become criminals. A few years ago they allowed women to vote. Women were allowed to vote in 1994. 11 12. Readers are overloaded with too much to read Too many tools suggesting them what to read Tell key ideas early Readers loose interest, if they cant find key ideas within first few sentences Use your limited word budget to get most attention Cut all unneeded words Let most sentences be short & simple Simplicity wins 12 13. 13 14. A direction to a journal article, book, passage, etc., where certain information may be found An indication of author(s), work, page, etc., to be looked at or consulted Can be a book, journal article, newspaper, website, blog, diagram, or any other source How it looks depends on referencing style you are using 14 15. To inform reader of sources of direct quotations, data, diagrams, etc. When paraphrasing another authors ideas When describing a theory or model associated with a particular author To give weight & credibility to your argument As supporting evidence To avoid charges of plagiarism 15 16. The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., & passing it off as one's own; literary theft - Oxford English Dictionary, 2008 16 17. Your own ideas & observations Common knowledge Things that are referenced in the past may become common knowledge with time e.g., theory of relativity, Newtown's laws Historical overviews Conclusions 17 18. Key idea is to be consistent within an article/paper & across articles/papers Author-Date Author & year of publication inserted in brackets after a quote or paraphrase Usually reference list at end of your article/paper arranged alphabetically by author Numerical Number each quote or paraphrase in the text Usually reference list at end of the article/paper with references in numerical order 18 19. .. [Perera and Peter; 2013] According to Perera and Peter [2013] .. [Perera and Peter; 2012a] .. [Perera and Peter; 2012b] . [12] According to Perera et al. [12] Based on [2-5] we also [2, 3, 4, 5] 19 20. Numerical IEEE Save space on manuscript Author/Date ACM Harvard Chicago MLA (Modern Language Association) style Journals & conferences may slightly alter a common style to save space 20 21. Conference Author names, Paper Title, Conference Name, Month & Year, Pages I. Baumgart, B. Heep, and S. Krause, OverSim: A Flexible Overlay Network Simulation Framework, In Proc. 10th Global Internet Symp., May 2007, pp. 79-84. Journal Author names, Paper Title, Journal Name, Volume, No, Year, Pages W. Rao, L. Chen, A.W.-C. Fu, and G. Wang, Optimal Resource Placement in Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks, IEEE Trans. Parallel and Distrib. Syst., vol. 21, no. 7, July 2010 D. McLaughlin et al., Short-Wavelength Technology and the Potential for Distributed Networks of Small Radar Systems, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., vol. 90, Dec. 2009, pp. 17971817. 21 22. Zotero https://www.zotero.org/ Web-browser based, free Mendeley - http://www.mendeley.com Web & desktop based, partly free, automatically pull references from paper EndNote Application, commercial, Many university libraries provide access 22