Marmara Elt Resources

Informal and Formal Writing Assignments

Defining Informal and Formal Writing

Informal Writing/Writing to Learn: Writing for the main purpose of finding out if students understand material, have completed reading, or done assigned work.

Formal Writing/Learning to Write: Writing for the main purpose of having the student present content from the discipline in a style and form that practitioners could readily recognize and accept.

Informal Writing

• By articulating their analyses and opinions on paper, students digest information more quickly and are able to reflect critically on course content.
• Theoretically, students end up improving their writing by writing a lot, but the main goal is to improve their learning.
• Using writing activities in your classroom creates an active classroom with engaged students. Read the rest of this entry »

Compound sentences are composed of at least two main clauses. In each clauses (simple sentences), there must be at least a subject and a verb. The following coordinating conjunctions compound the clauses:

and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet

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Essay writing is both an art and a science. It is an art in that the writer must come up with a good idea, put thought behind it, choose provocative words and entertain while informing the reader. Good essays take a fair amount of creativity and style, and many of them even successfully tweak the science part of it without doing any harm. However, there is a basic science to writing a successful essay that flows, and all good essayists, from E.B. White to Joan Didion, had the science down before they were able to creatively manipulate it.
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When you are writing an essay, the first step is to choose a topic and determine what direction or point of view you will take. Your essay may try to persuade the reader to share your view on the topic, it may try to explain to the reader how to complete a particular task, or it may try to inform or educate the reader on a particular topic.

Every good essay will follow the following outline:
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