2nd day of writing class

today is my second writing for academic purposes class, and because our lecturer, Mr. Alwasilah is in london, we get a new lecturer, Miss. Susi. I once taught by her in my first semester, at writing for general communication.
in this first meeting today, class members introduce themselves each other. miss.Susi tell us about the class rules and the syllabus, what we will do next in this course, and so on. she also tell us some advice about how to interact with lecturer properly and respectly. i think, the advices are really good for me, because the advices make me aware of how should we act properly with people.

Academic Writing vs. Literary Works

A lot of people around the world like writing.  Whether it is writing in case of any obligation, or just for a hobby.  The type of writing itself is so various, but we can divide it into two major group, formal and non-formal writing.  And now, we will discuss about the differences and similarities between Academic writing which is belong to formal writing, and Literary Works that is belong to non-formal writing.

We will start with Academic writing first.  Academic Writing is usually used by students in University to make their paper, or used by the academician to give any information that can be justified by factual evidence and data. "[Marilyn S.] Stern glass (1977), in summarizing her longitudinal study of 53 college students' writing development, identified four general purposes of writing in university courses: to make knowledge conscious, to help remember facts, to analyze concepts, and to construct new knowledge. Specifically, [students] used writing to translate concepts into their own language, move from gathering facts to analyses of them, and adjust themselves to the task demands of specific courses and fields." (Alister H. Cumming, Goals for Academic Writing. John Benjamins, 2006).  Based on this citation, we can conclude that Academic writing must contain facts.  Different from Literary works that we no need to bring any factual evidence on what we say.  We can’t just say something subjective, that can’t be justified in our academic writing. 

So, how can we get the facts about the issue that we discuss in our Academic Writing? We can get it by doing research about the issue, collect the data, check the accuracy, and then, make any statement based on it.  For example, we can see the example in Alwasilah’s article “Teachers as researchers; is it possible in Indonesia?” the fourth paragraph says: “Otensibly, the certification program has improved welfare, but failed to improve quality o teaching, which is the bedrock of professionalism. This is consistent with the findings of my 2011 survey on the perceived impacts of PLPG.”  In this citation, Alwasilah made a factual statement supported by his survey on 2011.  It means that his statement is factual and can be justified.

Another traits of academic writing are; the paragraph is well-structured, beginning from introduction from what we’re going to talking about, then the discussion, and closed by the conclusion of the issue.  The words that we use in it, should be straightforward to avoid ambiguity.

Next, let’s discuss about Literary work.  Actually literary work has a various branch such as novels, drama, short stories, and poetry.  The purpose of this type of text itself is to amuse the  reader and generally gives no information.  These type of writing is more flexible than academic writing.   In contrast with academic writing which we have to use factual statement, in literary work we are free to write anything we want even it’s just imagination.  We can also use non-formal and connotative words to make it beautiful.  The structure in literary work is not well organized as in academic writing.  There’s no need to attach introduction, discussion, and conclusion to make a poem for example.

So, the conclusion is that Academic Writing and Literary Work are totally different. From the diction, the structure, and the purpose.