Academic Reading & Writing

Reading and writing are the bread and butter of tertiary level students. Both are skills that they need to train for and master if they want to be successful in the academic world.

Reading involves techniques like skimming and scanning. Readers need to understand fully the content and structure of a text they are reading in order to be able to take notes and summarise or paraphrase the text.

There are different types of texts to read and different types of writing. At university level, most texts read are of the academic type, i.e. they deal with topics of a theoretical and scholarly nature, use technical and abstract language, and are structured logically.

Writing is a skill that can be practised and learned. The most common forms of writing that university students are required to produce are essays (often under examination conditions), assignments, reports and thesis or dissertations. Students need to be trained in how to write effectively and correctly about academic topics. This mainly involves describing, discussing and evaluating the results obtained from research.

Students need to be able to combine the two skills of reading and writing. They must know how to obtain information from various sources, integrate this information with their own ideas, and present their thoughts in a coherent, consistent, correct and stylistically appropriate manner. Moreover, writers also need to be familiar with certain writing conventions that are expected in academic texts. For example, they need to know how to formulate a list of references in the appropriate manner, how to cite or quote other people’s research and, in particular, how to avoid plagiarism, i.e. copying.

The aim of the various courses in academic reading and writing is to provide students with the skills and tools they require to understand and write academic texts. To this end, language-specific courses are available to students seeking to develop these skills in Maltese and English.