Proceedings of the Symposium on
Academic Writing and Critical Thinking
Toward Academic Writing with Substance
John Wojdylo
Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science,
Nagoya University
This essay is a coherent response to the incoherent objectives of the First International Symposium on Academic Writing and Critical Thinking. The first step towards coherence is to recognise that artificially separating the roles of teacher and learner is inconsistent with the nature of teaching. Also, we reject the view that the primary aim of academic writing is "to convince readers to accept the paper's thesis statement by demonstrating the logical steps that lead to it". On the contrary, the primary aim ought to be to describe the grounds – the foundations – so persuasively that the required logical steps become very simple and transparent.
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