Frameworks
for Academic Writing
Hi All!
Under a creative commons license, you may now download Frameworks for Academic Writing as a .pdf file. This also means you can reproduce, change, add to, or delete anything you want to - as long as you give me credit and you do not sell any portion of the book. I want others to be able to help students learn academic writing in a friendly, trusting way.
If you are not familiar with Frameworks for Academic Writing, it is quite different from any other textbook or writing system. First, it is designed for a wide range of writing abilities, from beginning to expert academic writers. ESL, ADL, LD, ADHD, and other writers who are simply unfamiliar with academic writing patterns benefit from sentence-by-sentence templates, prompts, tutorials, and examples. More confident writers may simply use the checklists provided. We have successfully applied the system to all academic writers, from 3rd-graders to dissertation writers.
Secondly, the book is designed for a wide range of teaching abilities. It is particularly useful for a beginning writing teacher, though it simplifies the writing process for anyone who wants to implement writing into a curriculum in a controlled and methodical way. Many teachers of other disciplines and curricula find it useful as well.
Free download, Frameworks for Academic Writing
Here is a preview of the table of contents:
The book is still available, in case you want to order a hard copy:
I was that English teacher.
I spent class time talking about writing or talking about reading or talking about literature. Then, I was surprised and disappointed when my students' writing (which they, of course, completed outside of class) was poor. My relationship with my students was confrontational, coercive, and argumentative. Plagiarism and cheating were rampant, and I fell into the "us vs. them" attitude that most of my colleagues seemed to have. I doubled down on methods in which I was trained, but the harder I tried the worse my students seemed to get.
I knew I had to try something different.
One day, I asked students to write an introduction to an essay in class. As I walked around the class, individual students stopped me to ask questions. The question they asked most, after writing a sentence or two, was, "What do I write next?" Rather than tell them or give suggestions, I decided to ask each one a question back. "You have written what you want to say, in general, about your topic. Can you be more specific?" or "Why is that important to you?" or "How do you see yourself doing what you suggest here?" or "What words in the reading caused you to react that way?" And so on.
Over the next 25 years, I perfected a way to ask questions in writing so that students could do ALL their writing in class.
I put it all together in a single textbook, Frameworks for Academic Writing. I used it for 15 years with outstanding success and so did many of my colleagues.
Now, I want to make these strategies available to everyone, for free.
Steve Poulter
