Advanced Writing

This is the third course in the Academic English: Writing specialization, and it is a more advanced writing course. It will help you raise the level of your writing and make you more aware of the type of writing you can expect in college. You’ll learn what plagiarism is and how to avoid it using correct MLA citations. Also, you'll learn to write a synthesis essay, which will help develop your critical thinking skills. Finally, you’ll write a documented essay, which will help further enhance your skill of using outside sources in your writing.

In the previous class, you learned about writing argument essays. Here you're going to learn how to make your essays more academic by writing more body paragraphs and adding support from outside sources. You will write a new argument essay, and since you already know how to write an argument, this will be a good way to practice using sources. You will also start learning about MLA format.

The topic of this module is very important for you to know about before you start taking college classes. Plagiarism is a kind of academic dishonesty that gets students into big trouble or even gets them dismissed from school. In this module, you will learn what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

In college classes, you will often be asked to read several articles and write an essay about an idea you form from reading the articles. This kind of essay is called a synthesis essay. In this module, you will be given two lists of articles to choose from. You will need to read the articles on your list and then write a synthesis essay. You will use sources from the articles to support your own ideas.