I have chosen a spoken style because I am trying to explain difficult concepts simply and to lead you step by step towards a mastery of writing techniques. However, spoken style would be inappropriate for most serious formal texts. The choice of style depends on the audience's expectations and needs. The key question is whether the reader knows more or less than the writer.  

A pedagogic text should be syntactically simple, and to a certain extent repetitious, in order to inform, consolidate and clarify.

An academic essay, dissertation, or seminar paper should be syntactically complex and concise in order to explore ideas.

Syntactic complexity should not be confused with obscurity. On the contrary, complexity is necessary for clarity. It should never be a goal in itself, but a tool to formulate ideas effectively. Indeed, academic writing is perhaps the most effective way for a scholar to develop and test ideas. It is an intellectual process of discovering meaning. It is therefore quite different from the pedagogic text, in which the meaning is fixed and simply needs to be conveyed to an audience that does not know it. Therefore, lecturers' notes to their students should ideally be in a simpler style than the students' essays for their lecturers. In reality, this frequently is not the case, because many lecturers are more interested in exploring an idea than explaining it clearly, while many students lack the skills or confidence to write with sufficient complexity.

This course will develop those skills, but first it is necessary to unlearn the habits that you may have been relying on so far. This can be a painful and bewildering process, but like the first draft it is unavoidable. You will probably feel an initial loss of confidence as your grammatical water wings are punctured, but I promise you that within a few weeks you will be happily diving into the deep end.

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• An academic essay must be a concise, coherent, detailed and logically structured exploration of ideas.
• This can only be achieved through a process of redrafting.
• All first drafts resemble spoken discourse, which means they are periphrastic, incoherent and illogical by the standards of written discourse.
• Therefore the first draft should be written well in advance of the deadline to allow time for substantial redrafting.

You may now proceed to the main part of the course, or if you feel you need further practice in distinguishing between written and spoken styles, you may be interested in a comparison between 'nursery', 'novelistic', 'journalistic' and 'academic' style.

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