TL;DR

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 1 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 The On Campus imprint of UBC Press features publications
designed for the diverse members of the university community –
students, faculty, instructors, staf, and administrators.
On Campus ofers a range of interesting, sometimes
unconventional, but always useful information. All On Campus
works are assessed by experts in the field prior to publication.
To ensure afordability, PDFs are available as free downloads from
the UBC Press website, with print and other digital formats also
available through our website, bookstores, and libraries.

On Campus books are designed to help readers successfully

meet the intellectual and social challenges encountered at
university or college today and include:

How to Succeed at University (and Get a Great Job!):

Mastering the Critical Skills You Need for School, Work, and Life,
by Thomas R. Klassen and John A. Dwyer
(also available in French from University of Ottawa Press)

It’s All Good (Unless It’s Not): Mental Health Tips and Self-Care
Strategies for Your Undergrad Years, by Nicole Malette

You @ the U: A Guided Tour through Your First Year of University,

by Janet Miller

The Successful TA: A Practical Approach to Efective Teaching,

by Kathy M. Nomme and Carol Pollock

To find out more about On Campus books visit www.ubcpress.ca.

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 2 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 TL;DR
A Very Brief Guide
to Reading and Writing
in University

Joel Heng Hartse

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 3 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 © 2023 On Campus, an imprint of UBC Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: TL;DR : a very brief guide to reading and writing in university /

Joel Heng Hartse.
Other titles: Too long; didn’t read
Names: Hartse, Joel Heng, author.
Description: Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230229522 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230229557
ISBN 9780774839143 (softcover) | ISBN 9780774839150 (PDF)
ISBN 9780774839167 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Academic writing. | LCSH: English language—Rhetoric.
Classification: LCC LB2369 .H37 2023 | DDC 808.02—dc23

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing
program of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund),
the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Set in Acumin Variable and Source Sans Pro by Gerilee McBride

Copy editor: Lesley Erickson
Cover designer: Gerilee McBride

UBC Press
The University of British Columbia
2029 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2

www.ubcpress.ca
 This is for Ollie and Ben; may your nascent
love of reading and other forms of making meaning
bring you joy for the rest of your lives.

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 5 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

A Note for Students / ix

A Note for Instructors / xi
Preface / xiv
Introduction / 3

1 Stuff You Should Know before You Start / 7

Literacy / 9
Language / 15
Audience / 20
Genre / 24

2 Reading and Writing about Other Texts / 29

Academic Reading / 31
Summary / 35
Attribution / 38
Paraphrasing and Quotation / 44
Response / 49
Stance / 56
Plagiarism / 59
Citations / 63

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 7 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 3 Writing “The Paper” / 69
What “The Paper” Is / 71
Structure / 74
Topic / 80
Sources / 85
Thesis Statements / 96
Introductions / 99
Paragraphs / 101
Conclusions / 104
Flow / 108
Making Changes / 113

4 Other Stuff You Should Know / 117

Feedback / 119
Vocabulary / 123
Grammar / 127
Sentences / 130

Further Reading / 133

Instructor Appendix / 137
Acknowledgments / 149

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 8 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 A Note for Students

You don’t have to read this book all the way through. You
can just dip in and out of it as needed.
In fact, if you don’t have time to read the rest of this
book, just read this list.

How to Get Better at Writing

1 Recognize it will take a long time.

2 Read a lot.

3 Write a lot.

4 Have lots of other people read your writing and give

you feedback.

5 Be aware that no one person’s ideas about writing will

be exactly right for your particular context.

6 Don’t leave all the work to the last minute.

7 Use whatever method of proofreading works for you,

but definitely use one.

8 Know your audience and their expectations by asking

questions and doing your own research (see no. 2).

ix

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 9 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

9 Multitasking doesn’t work. Don’t do ten other things

on your computer or phone while you’re writing.

10 Unless advised otherwise, never use any font but

twelve-point Times New Roman (double-spaced) for
the rest of your life. It will just make everything a lot
simpler.

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 10 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 A Note for Instructors

I wrote this during the period when we all had to switch

to online instruction due to the COVID pandemic (remem-
ber that?), and I didn’t want to force my students to buy a
textbook, because some of them couldn’t even leave their
home countries, let alone make a trip to our university’s
bookstore. I tried to strip my writing class down to its bare
essentials, but I found there were still things I wanted to
explain to students in ways that didn’t work very well over
a Zoom lecture.
So I set out to write the world’s shortest writing text-
book. My goal was to write in a direct, no BS, friendly,
informal way and to be honest about what I see as import-
ant for succeeding in first-year writing courses and the
early stages of undergraduate programs generally. Not
everyone will agree with me, and doubtless what I think
of as “important” is shaped by my own experiences. (For
example, my doctoral training was in applied linguistics,
and I do not work in an English department, which may be
quite diferent from the backgrounds of many people who
teach first-year writing.)

xi

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 11 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

I can envision this book being used in several ways:

• as an alternative to a traditional textbook in a class
where you’d like to experiment with not using a text-
book or using an afordable or free one

• as a supplement (a “TL;DR” version, if you will) to a

traditional textbook

• as a self-study guide, a kind of manual or handbook

students might use on their own time

• as a way for you to have students explore some ideas

about what writing is and what it should do at the
university level, by discussing whether you, as their
instructor, agree with the way various themes are
presented and having students reflect on some of the
claims made in the book

• as a reference guide to specific topics, where you give

out one or two sections as needed while teaching a
specific thing, like summarizing or attribution.

Feel free to assign just a few chapters or sections here

and there and in whatever order you want – this book
could have been organized a thousand diferent ways, so
let your own needs and those of your students guide how
you use it.
I hope you find this book at least somewhat helpful,
and I hope you feel free to disagree with it and tell your
students why, because in doing so, you’ll prove something

x ii

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 12 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 A Note for Instructors

that will be useful to them: that not everyone agrees on

what good writing is and how it’s done, and that this is an
important fact they’ll need to navigate throughout their
academic careers. Oh – and also, there’s an appendix at
the end of the book with some ideas for activities you
might consider using or adapting.

TL;DR: This is a very short book about academic

writing. I hope you like it, but you don’t have to.

x iii

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 13 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Preface

I want to tell you a little something about the title of this

book. TL;DR means “too long; didn’t read.” It’s a thing
people say on the internet when they run into a giant block
of text that looks long and boring.
Actually, that’s not totally true: it’s usually the writer of
the giant block themselves who ends a long, rambling post
with something like the following:

the entire text of Moby-Dick

 TL;DR: A guy chases a whale for a long time.

To be honest, “a giant block of text that looks long and

boring” describes what textbooks can feel like sometimes.
It also describes what some people think their papers
should look like in university.
I’m here to tell you this doesn’t have to be the case.
This book is called TL;DR because there’s a lot you need
to know about writing and reading in university, but it can
sometimes be boring to read about. I decided to write a
very short guide that includes everything I think is import-
ant, explained as clearly and simply as possible. My hope

x iv

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 14 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Preface

is no one will have to say “TL;DR” about this book. There

are very few references, not many detailed examples, no
exercises, and no assignments. Just stuf you as a student
should know.
Also, I know that sometimes it can feel like everything
is too long to read, and that you need to write long, dense
papers with a whole lot of long, fancy words, in long, fancy
sentences, in long, fancy paragraphs. But there are ways
to approach long texts that can make them easier to read,
and there are ways to write that are simpler, more concise,
and easier than you might think.
Why should you trust me, the person who is going to be
giving you supposedly good advice throughout this book,
if you don’t know me? I’ve been teaching writing for a long
time. I think I know what works and what doesn’t. And I’m
here to help.
The more I think about it, the more I think trust is a real-
ly important ingredient in the whole university experience.
First and foremost, we (your professors and instructors)
owe it to you. If you can’t trust us – trust that we know what
we’re doing and we really want to help you do well at the
stuf we are teaching – then we’re not doing our jobs well.
I hope you know that most of us do strive to be trust-
worthy, and that we really do want to see you succeed,
even if it feels like we’re just randomly giving out grades
sometimes. At the same time, trust needs to be mutual:
you have to be able to trust your peers, and your peers and

xv

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 15 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

instructors have to be able to trust you. I don’t just mean

that we all have to be able to trust that nobody is cheating
(though that surely is important), but we have to be able to
trust at a much more basic, human level that we’re going
to do our best to meet commitments we’ve made, do the
work we’ve signed up to do, and do it with kindness and
respect.
We’ll fail each other sometimes, but there’s a kind of
unwritten contract that we’ve all got to try to do our best
at this, even if it’s a class we kind of don’t want to take (for
students) or teach (for instructors).
It’s in that spirit that I ofer this short book.

TL;DR: Writing doesn’t have to be hard, but we have

to be nice to each other.

x vi

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 16 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 TL;DR

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 1 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Universities are ABOUT writing.

—Ken Hyland, “Writing in the University”

Writing is the most important thing in the world.

OK, maybe not. But it’s definitely one of the most
important.
You don’t have to think writing is fun or interesting,
but it has changed the world more than almost any other
human technology. It has created countries, started wars,
made laws, brought about liberation and oppression. It’s
hard to think of any other thing humans have made that
has changed the world more, including the internet and
nuclear weapons.
It also seems completely magical to me. Did you know
that with language we have finite resources – a limited
number of words available to us – but that by combining
and adding things to our sentences, using simple tools of
grammar we all know simply from having grown up listen-
ing to language, we can make sentences go on and on lit-
erally forever?

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 3 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

I’m not saying we should make sentences go forever.

I’m just saying it’s pretty amazing that we can.
Writing is a big deal in many – perhaps most – contempor-
ary cultures and societies, and it’s almost definitely a big deal
in the context you find yourself, which is probably a university.
Writing well, or at least being able to write in a way
that’s efective for your purpose, is going to be important
for you during university, and maybe for the rest of your
life. Your writing will be evaluated a lot for the next few
years, and more importantly, you’ll use writing to learn,
think, and understand. And it can be a very useful tool for
doing all of those things.
“Writing well” for the next few years might look difer-
ent than what you’ve gotten used to in your life so far. This
book is meant to tell you some basic information about
how to “write well” in a simple, short, and easy-to-read
way. I’m going to try to say in a few short chapters what a
lot of textbooks try to explain in two hundred or three hun-
dred or five hundred pages.
There aren’t many examples or references in this book –
not because they aren’t helpful, but because I want to
be as direct as possible. The book doesn’t address every
single problem you’ll face when it comes to writing, and
it doesn’t explain how to write every type of assignment.
It’s just quick, easy, bite-sized chunks of advice that I think
you’ll find helpful as you navigate your first couple of years
of academic writing afer high school.

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 4 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Introduction

I will provide a very short summary at the end of each

section, like this:

TL;DR: Writing is really important in our society, and

this short book will give you some (hopefully) good
advice about how to do it while you’re in university.

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 5 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 ONE

Stuf You Should Know

before You Start

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 7 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 Literacy

Reading is not exhausted merely by decoding the

written word or written language, but rather anticipated by
and ex tending into knowledge of the world.

—Paulo Freire, “The Importance of the Act of Reading”

You Are Already Good at Reading and Writing

Sometimes when we talk about reading and writing, we
use the word literacy. Even though they have the same root
word, literacy has nothing to do with literature. Literacy
just means reading and writing – and not just poetry or
novels or whatever, but grocery lists and emails and text
messages and road signs.
Since the 1990s or so, the meaning of literacy has
expanded to include other things like visual design, sound,
video, and so on.
My own fancy academic definition of literacy is “any
symbolic meaning-making activity.”
This sounds complicated, but we all do it all the time.
If you’re like most undergraduates, you have been super
into literacy for most of your life. Using social media and

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 9 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

texting are all literacy activities. You are probably good at

using some of them because you’ve had a lot of practice.
Maybe a better definition is “being able to understand
or make sense of something.”
Communicating using social media or your phone or
computer is one kind of literacy, and the reading and writ-
ing you have done in school for most of your life is another
kind. So is being able to read a poster advertising a concert
or knowing what the trafic signals at a stoplight mean. All
of these things are diferent, but it’s all symbolic meaning-
making activity. It’s all making sense of or understanding
things by using language and other symbols. 👍

TL;DR: Literacy just means knowing how to do

things, usually with words.

There Are Diferent Kinds of Literacy

The language we use in school is not better or more special
than other kinds of language; it’s just diferent. This is over-
simplified, but some people would break it down like this:

Out of school In school

Informal Formal
Simple words Complicated words
Short and simple sentences Long and complicated sentences
Connected to real life Connected to abstract ideas
More oral or speech-like More written or book-like

10

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 10 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

Out of school In school

Playful, fun, sometimes rude Serious and proper
(no swear words!)
Progressive; new words and slang Conservative; traditional
Grammar and spelling don’t Grammar and spelling matter
matter a lot
Your family’s language or dialect English only

It isn’t always this black and white. The reality of lit-

eracy is always more complicated. Depending on what
you want to say, you might mix some stuf from the out-of-
school side with the in-school side when you write in one
class or another. That’s ofen OK, and it will usually be clear
if your prof is OK with it. For example, some assignments
might call for “personal reflection,” which would probably
be less formal than a paper written using information you
found in academic journal articles.
It’s important to know that some of your professors
will feel very strongly that only the stuf on the right side of
the chart is OK. They’re probably remembering what they
were taught, but the truth is, there are a lot of diferent
ways to write successfully, depending on who you’re writ-
ing for and what they expect. The important thing – and
this is the first of many times I will repeat this – is to learn
about what your reader (in this case, usually your prof or
TA) wants or expects.
I had a student a few years ago who would repeat vari-
ations on the same phrase whenever we met to discuss

11

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 11 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

her papers: “What are you looking for here?” “I’m not sure
what you’re looking for here.” “I didn’t know what you were
looking for there.” I’ll be honest: at first, I found this a bit
annoying. But she was right to be so persistent. I really had
to explain what I thought was important for the assign-
ment, and I had to explain why. It was as hard for me as it
was for her, but it made her paper better, and made me a
better teacher.
It’s important to find out if your instructor feels strong-
ly that your writing needs to stay on the in-school side of
this oversimplified chart. If you disagree with them, you
have a couple of choices. You can try to write that way, or
you can try to get them to change their minds by writing
things that are good but break their rules. (A warning: you
do this at your own risk. Not every instructor is interested
in reading groundbreaking, experimental writing, which
is why it’s important that you get to know them and their
expectations.)
It’s true that what most people call “academic writing”
looks more like the in-school side of the chart, but some of
the stuf on the right side is less important than it seems.
For example, complicated words and long senten-
ces don’t often make academic writing better. Usually,
it’s better to be simple and direct. Don’t go out of your
way to use “fancy” words just because you think it will
make you sound smart. Sometimes the simplicity and
directness of the out-of-school side are perfectly OK for

12

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 12 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

a university writing assignment. As I said, it depends on

the situation.

TL;DR: You can write however you want, but many

profs will prefer formal language. However, you may
be able to break the “rules” if and when you want.

Reading and Writing in University Is Diferent

Than in High School
In most high schools, there is a class called English (or
Language Arts) that includes all kinds of things having to
do with language – things like spelling, grammar, vocabu-
lary, poetry, creative writing, and literature.
However, unless you’re taking an English literature
class in university, things like literature and poetry don’t
have much of a relationship to academic writing at all. You
don’t need to write in a “poetic” style to be a good aca-
demic writer.
In high school English, you might have learned about
figurative language – metaphors, similes, and things like
that. You might have learned that you need to use this kind
of language to make your writing interesting or beautiful.
You might have also learned that you need a fun “hook” to
get readers interested in your introduction.
In university, you don’t usually need any of those things.
It depends on what you’re studying, but in university, the
following things are usually more important in writing:

13

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 13 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

• understanding the expectations of your audience

(usually your professor)

• being direct about what you intend to communicate

• carefully and clearly explaining how you’re using

other texts

• having a clear main purpose or thesis for a piece of

writing

• writing paragraphs that have one main focus

• writing with words and sentence patterns that fit the

purpose

• producing a text that is relatively free of grammar

errors.

You might try thinking of writing as a tool for doing

things rather than as an art form.
It can be (and is) both, of course. But if you learned
that writing is poetry in high school, try thinking of writ-
ing as more like a screwdriver in university. Writing can be
Shakespeare, yes, but it can also be a user manual for your
wireless headphones – a tool to accomplish a purpose.

TL;DR: Unlike other kinds of writing, academic

writing doesn’t have to be beautiful or fancy; it
should be clear and direct.

14

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 14 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Language

Academic writing is a second language for everyone.

—Ling Shi, during a class I took from her

You Don’t Have to Write Like a “Native Speaker”

If you grew up speaking a language other than English at
home, and you learned English in school, you might think
you’re at a disadvantage at an “English-speaking” university.
This isn’t true! If you studied English as a second or addition-
al language, you probably have more knowledge of English
grammar than your classmates who grew up only speaking
English, because you probably had to learn all the rules.
It’s true that there are certain patterns or variations
that are more common to so-called ESL writers, but it
doesn’t make them wrong.
In fact, “standard” English is mostly an imaginary lan-
guage hardly anyone uses.
Your writing teacher will definitely point out serious
errors in grammar or word choice or sentence structure if
you make them, but not all variations from so-called stan-
dard English are actually wrong. They’re just diferent.

15

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 15 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

So-called native speakers do this all the time too.

Being a native speaker doesn’t make you automatically
better at writing in English in school. It just means English
is the language you grew up with. Nobody grows up writing
ten-page academic papers with APA-style reference lists,
though. (And if you did, that’s weird. I’m sorry.)
If you’re worried about making errors, consider keep-
ing track of all the errors that your professors mark. I know
that sounds like a lot of work, and it probably will be. You
can write them all down in a notebook or on a spread-
sheet or something. You can note what the error was, and
what the correct version of it would be. Go back to it every
few weeks and look for patterns. Is there something that
comes up over and over? Try to focus on that.
If you find English grammar confusing, or find it very
hard to write English sentences: first, you’re not alone, and
second, unfortunately, there’s no magical way to sudden-
ly improve in a few days or weeks. You’re probably going
to have to do a lot of reading and writing in English for a
long time. It’s hard, but if you keep at it, you’ll find your-
self getting more comfortable and eventually notice real
improvement.

TL;DR: Not being a “native speaker” doesn’t mean

you’re a bad writer.

16

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 16 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

Racism, Prejudice, and Judgments about Language

Another thing to be aware of: it’s OK to break rules some-
times, even the rules of so-called standard English. Some
people call this writing with an “accent,” but the fact is we
all have ways of using language that feel more right and
true and useful to us and that might not always match the
grammar or vocabulary of standard English.
The way I’m writing this book is a good example of
breaking the rules. When I sat down to write this, I decid-
ed I was going to ignore what many people have been tell-
ing me my whole life: that my sentences are sometimes too
“wordy,” or that I overuse I, or that I should stop using so
many adverbs like basically or totally or entirely. But I like
writing that way, and even though I try to change those
things when I write more formal academic articles, I feel
like it will make this book more readable and personable.
(I hope I’m right.)
“But Joel,” you might say, even though we don’t really
know each other, “you’re a middle-aged white guy. When
you break the rules, people seem to be OK with it, but what
about me, who is not a middle-aged white guy?”
And I would say, “You’re right to bring this up, and also,
I feel like you should’ve said ‘who am not a middle-aged
white guy,’ but now that I think about it, that doesn’t sound
right either. English grammar is weird.”
Grammar aside, this question is absolutely a relevant
and important one. What happens when, say, a young

17

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 17 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

South Asian woman or Black man breaks “the rules” of

writing? There are linguistic judgments made that are
not actually based on language but on what some lin-
guists call “raciolinguistics.” To give one brief disturbing
example: There are research studies in which people are
asked to rate a speaker’s English afer listening to a record-
ing and seeing a picture of the person who is (supposedly)
speaking. Sometimes their rating of how good the speak-
er’s English is changes depending on the race of the per-
son whose picture is shown – even when the recordings
are actually of the same person, but the pictures are difer-
ent. That is, people may rate a racialized person’s English
as “worse” than a white person’s even when they sound
identical.
There are convincing arguments to be made that an
insistence on strictly following certain norms of so-called
standard English (which, to be totally honest, doesn’t real-
ly exist except as an imagined concept people use to com-
plain about language they don’t like) is part of upholding
systemic racism and contributes to the marginalization of
already marginalized peoples’ ways of using language. Not
everyone agrees with this perspective, and I’m in no pos-
ition to tell you how to think about this issue, because I
don’t have the same life experience as you. But it’s worth
knowing and being aware that people ofen use words
like correctness, norms, and standards when they’re really
making judgments based on race.

18

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 18 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

TL;DR: Many people make judgments about stu-

dents’ writing based not on the quality of language
but on racial stereotypes and prejudices.

19

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 19 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Audience

The writer’s audience is always a fiction.

—Walter J. Ong

You Are Writing for Your Professor, Mostly

It’s important to think of your audience and purpose in
writing. The most obvious audience for university writ-
ing is your professor or TA, the person who gave you the
assignment or who will grade it. And the “purpose” is that
that person told you to write the paper.
I realize that this can make the whole thing feel kind
of fake.
Some writing has an obvious real-world purpose. The
purpose of a research article is to communicate know-
ledge. The purpose of a news article on a sports website is
to tell you who won the game. The purpose of an Instagram
caption is to tell you about Kim Kardashian’s new perfume,
or whatever. These are real-world things that those writers
and their texts are doing.
So what is the purpose of, say, your lab report? It does
have some connection to the real world. You need to

20

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 20 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

explain what you did during your lab experiment, which is,
indeed, a real thing that happened in the real world. (I’m
not a scientist, so I don’t really know what you’re doing in
the lab, but I’m sure it was cool!)
But there’s another purpose that isn’t talked about as
much, and it’s not related to the “real world” so much as
its “meta”-purpose, a purpose beyond the stated aim of
the assignment. It’s for you to show your instructor that
you understood the assignment, that you know the proper
names for the things you’re learning about, and that you
can write about them in a way that other people familiar
with that subject can understand and make sense of.
In a way, then, the hidden purpose of every writing
assignment in university is to “prove you can write this
kind of assignment.” That does feel a bit artificial, but it
isn’t all bad. This is actually an important part of the thing
you’re learning to do in university: to develop your know-
ledge and skills – your literacy, really – in the subject(s)
you’re studying.
Even though this audience (your prof) and purpose
(prove you understood the assignment) can feel artifi-
cial, you should still take it seriously and recognize that
it’s important. You need to know your professor’s prefer-
ences and what they think good writing is. “Understanding
the assignment” will turn out to be a pretty crucial skill
throughout university, in your career, and even in your
relationships with other people throughout your life.

21

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 21 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

To “understand the assignment” is the assignment.

Learning diferent ways of doing things (in this case, writ-
ing) that are called for (or useful, or helpful) in diferent
situations is one of the most important things about being
human.
Sometimes professors will be clear about the purposes
they have in mind, and they will give you clear directions
for how to complete assignments and explain their expect-
ations. Sometimes they won’t do this at all, and you’ll have
to push a bit, like my student did with me (“What are you
looking for here?”) or you’ll need to look elsewhere for
help and advice, like a friend or a writing centre.
If you don’t like this more artificial purpose (“prove you
understand the assignment”) – and I don’t blame you! –
it can also help to have in mind an imaginary third party
as your audience rather than just the person grading your
paper. It could be your classmates, or people who also
study the subject you’re studying, or someone else. Your
professor might even directly tell you who your imaginary
audience should be.
This imaginary audience is actually kind of real,
because you make it real. If you write with that audience in
mind, it will change what you write. If you imagine you’re
writing for an audience of doctors, you may find you nat-
urally choose diferent language than if you imagine you’re
writing for your uncle who posts outdated memes on
Facebook. The better you know your audience – real or

22

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 22 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

imagined – the better chance you have to tell them what

you want to tell them.

TL;DR: Write for your professor or an imaginary

audience you think would be interested in what
you’re writing about.

23

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 23 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Genre

We don’t write writing, we write something.

—Anthony Paré, “What We Know about Writing,

and Why It Matters”

There’s No Such Thing as “Just Writing”

Genre is a French word that means “kind” or “type.” It’s
sort of like a category for art or language or other things
humans produce.
Punk is a genre of music; horror is a genre of movies;
romance is a genre of novels.
Genres are collections of features that we have come
to expect in a given situation; they are ways of organizing
human activity. How do we know what the features of a
genre are? Usually, we know a genre from being a part of
our larger culture and being exposed to it and told what it
is by other people. We may know punk rock has distorted
guitars and fast drums and loud shouted vocals. But if you
don’t know the culture, you might not know the genres.
I know nothing about music like EDM or IDM (I think they
both mean a kind of dance music?) or chillwave (I couldn’t

24

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 24 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

even tell you one feature of this genre, or even if people

still listen to it, but I’ve heard people talk about it). And if
you’re new to university, you probably aren’t too familiar
with the common genres of texts in academia.
Academic writing has many diferent genres. This is
one of the reasons it can be hard to get a handle on “how to
write” in university, because you’re probably being asked
to write many diferent types of things.
A researcher called Michael Carter came up with a use-
ful set of categories that he calls “metagenres,” or types of
writing that might include many other types. In his article
“Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines,”
he shows that four metagenres are usually called for in uni-
versity, depending on the purpose you’re writing for:

1 problem-solving or system-generating texts (business,

nursing, social work, engineering). This could be a
response to a business case study or an explanation of
how something works to accompany a diagram in an
engineering text.

2 empirical inquiry texts (science, medicine, social

sciences). This could be a paper about a chemistry
experiment, the results of survey research, or a write-
up of a clinical trial.

3 research from written sources (humanities). This is a

pretty common one to encounter early in your under-
grad career: ofen it’s a paper making an argument

25

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 25 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

about a literary text, but it could be about almost any-

thing. See Chapter 3, “Writing ‘The Paper.’”

4 performance or critique of a performance (arts). This

could be a spoken-word performance or a review of a
film or a play or a concert.

There might be diferent names for specific versions of

these genres; you might write a lab report (no. 2) or con-
duct a survey and write up the results in a research article
(also no. 2). You might write an analysis of a poem (no. 3) or
a description of a historical event (also no. 3).
The stuf that you learn to write in your “writing class”
doesn’t always match the stuf you go on to write in your
“real classes.” Again, this might feel a little artificial, but
the hope is that it will be useful later on. For example, in a
class I teach, we have a stand-alone summary assignment,
where students have to write short summaries of a variety
of types of texts. You might not have another professor tell
you to “write a summary” in, say, a third-year psychology
course, but you might find that part of the paper calls for
doing just that.
No matter what the class, your job is to try to figure
out what you’re being asked to write. If you’re not sure
how to write a certain assignment, or what genre it’s sup-
posed to be, read the assignment or syllabus carefully, or
ask your professor or writing centre for examples of other

26

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 26 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stuff You Should Know before You Start

pieces of writing in that genre. If you can, try to start a dis-

cussion about what they consider to be features of a good
assignment of this type, or try to find models of success-
ful papers while gently asking, “What is it, exactly, you’re
looking for here?”

TL;DR: Diferent classes and assignments call for

diferent genres; genres are ways of putting texts
together that diferent cultures (or fields or disci-
plines, etc.) have developed expectations for.

27

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 27 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 TWO

Reading and Writing

about Other Texts

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 29 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 Academic Reading

Read everything.

—Paul Kei Matsuda

First of all: I know that you already know how to read.

Like writing, reading is a bit diferent in university than
it is outside of it. The texts you read in university courses
are likely longer and more complex, and might be hard to
read (or boring, to be honest) at first. If the thing you’re
reading is an introductory textbook, the author is probably
an expert who is trying to get a lot of information across to
you in a short space, and it might feel overwhelming. If it’s
an article from an academic journal, the author is usually
a researcher who knows so much about their subject that
the only people who can really understand them are other
experts in that field, which is who their intended audience
usually is.

Read before You Read

A good way to start is what some people call “prereading”
or “reading around” a text. You should start by reading

31

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 31 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

everything but the actual text. If you’ve got a journal arti-

cle, read the title, the author’s name, and the name of the
journal. If it’s got an abstract, read that, and read it care-
fully. The abstract is a short paragraph before a research
article that gives you a summary of the whole thing. It’s
almost always useful. It will tell you all the important infor-
mation in the text. (In fact, if you’re in a hurry you can just
read the abstract, but don’t tell your professor I said that.)
Then read any section headings that are in the text, and
if you have time, skim the introduction and conclusion. If
you’ve got a textbook chapter to read, look at the whole
table of contents to see where the chapter fits, read all the
headings and subheadings in the chapter, look at the pic-
tures, charts, and diagrams, and, again, skim the intro and
conclusion.
Then ask yourself what you know about the text before
you start reading it. Hopefully, you have some idea of the
academic field the text is a part of, who wrote the text
and why they wrote it, and what the general focus or pur-
pose of the text is. This context might be part of how your
prof introduced the reading, but if it isn’t, you can look for
those things on your own.

Write While You Read

You should get in the habit of taking notes while you read. A
lot of people think writing notes by hand on actual paper is
the best way to do this, and I agree, but it’s OK if you don’t

32

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 32 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

have any paper. It’s helpful to make little notes in the mar-
gins; you can summarize as you read to help you remem-
ber what each section or paragraph or part is about. You
may also want to make notes of things you agree or dis-
agree with, things that confuse you or make you angry, or
questions you have about something the author claimed.
All this will help you take in the text, understand it, and
process it, so your notes will be useful when you start writ-
ing about it.
Something that can be helpful is making a “reverse
outline.” Usually, an outline is a rough sketch or plan of the
diferent parts of a paper you plan to write, and it’s usually
written before you start writing the actual paper, or around
the time you start writing. The reverse outline is the same
– a rough sketch of the diferent parts of the text – but it’s
written afer you have read a complete text. If you’re read-
ing something dense or dificult and want to keep every-
thing straight in your head, try writing a short summary
– usually not even a complete sentence – of the main ideas
of each paragraph or couple of paragraphs in the margins
of the text. This might help you retain the information bet-
ter and remind you how the writer’s ideas fit together.
Really, though, it’s OK if you don’t understand every-
thing you read. Ideally, you’ll be able to make it through a
text without stopping every few seconds to look up a word
or a concept; you can make notes of things you need to
clarify and then look them up, or perhaps even better, talk

33

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 33 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

to a classmate or ask about it on your class group chat, if

you have one. Meanings can become clearer when we try
to learn them along with other people.

TL;DR: Do a lot of skimming before you start reading

to get some idea of what a text is going to do, and
always take notes while you read.

34

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 34 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Summary

Let me explain. No, there is too much – let me sum up.

—Mandy Patinkin as Indigo Montoya in The Princess Bride

Explaining Another Text

Summarizing means explaining what another text is about
in “your own words.” I put your own words in quotes
because what are “your own words” anyway? (See the sec-
tions on paraphrasing and plagiarism for more on this.)
So, for now, let’s talk about some basic rules for writing a
summary.
Overall, your summary should briefly answer these
questions: What was that text mostly about? What was its
main idea, point, or argument?
Here are four things to keep in mind when summarizing:

Be objective and accurate. You need to accurately and

objectively tell your reader what the text was mainly
about. This means that there’s not much room for you to
express your own reactions to the text (unless your profes-
sor wants you to); your main task is to get the information

35

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 35 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

across. Even if you disagree with the author, it’s important

to present their views or ideas accurately rather than going
into detail about why you think they’re wrong.

Be thorough but concise. Ideally, you should imagine

that the reader has not read the text you’re summariz-
ing, so you’ll usually need to explain things like the names
and significance of people or organizations mentioned
in the text. So don’t just say the text is about “Dr. Smith,
who works with the ABCDE organization”; let the reader
know it’s Josephine Smith, a researcher at (let’s say) the
University of Alaska, and she works with the Association of
Broccoli, Carrot, and Daikon Enthusiasts.*
At the same time, you don’t need to mention a lot of
small details that don’t serve the main focus or purpose of
the original text. Maybe the original author mentioned Dr.
Smith’s dog in one sentence; unless the article is mostly
about dogs, you can leave the dog out.†

Provide context. Don’t just jump right into reporting “the

facts.” Your readers need to know where this information
is coming from. Provide some sense of who wrote the arti-
cle and what the overall vibe is; where it fits in the larger
world of the thing the author is writing about.

*   I’m   sorry   for   that   weird   example.   This   is   why   I   don’t   use   a   lot   of 
examples.
†   gain,   sorry.

36

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 36 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

Attribute words and ideas to their authors. This is a big

one: use phrases like “according to [author’s name] …”
or “[author] claims that …” or “Finally, [author] explains
that …” a lot. Use them way more than you think you need
to. If you don’t attribute almost everything to the original
author, the reader most likely won’t know where this stuf
came from, and in many cases may assume you’re claiming
these are your words and ideas. We will talk about this in
detail in the next few pages.

TL;DR: Summaries should be mostly objective,

thorough, concise, and clearly attributed to the
person who wrote the text you’re summarizing.

37

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 37 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Attribution

You miss 100 percent of the shots

you don’t take – Wayne Gretzky.

—Michael Scott, The Of fice *

Why Attribution Matters

Information isn’t a neutral thing just floating around out
there. It’s part of a larger social and cultural world. This is
why it’s important to distinguish your “voice” as the writer
of the summary from the voice of the author in the original
text. You didn’t make all this information up; it came from
somewhere else.
But wait – didn’t the last section say you should be
“objective” in a summary? Why are we talking about your
voice, then?

*  This is a joke from the American TV show The Office, but if 
you’ve never seen it or don’t know who Wayne Gretzky is, it needs 
a little explaining. The joke is that while Wayne Gretzky, who many 
people consider the greatest hockey player of all time, really did 
say this, the character in the show, Michael Scott, is attributing 
the quote to Gretzky, which is accurate and correct, but he’s 
also attributing it to himself, which just makes this whole thing 
confusing. 

38

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 38 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

By voice, I don’t mean your opinions or views. When

you’re just summarizing, it’s true that those things are
ofen not useful or called for.
What I mean is this: in academic writing, you ofen have
to remind your reader that you’re the one putting together
information from a variety of sources.
Here’s what is happening in the chain of communicat-
ing this information:

You’re not a journalist or researcher on the ground, report-

ing events or ideas first-hand; you’re the middleman, the
mediator between the original text and your reader.
This might sound strange, but the best way to show
that you have a voice as a summarizer is to use attribution
to show that you’re not the original author – make it clear
to your reader that you’re not the person who discovered
or created the information to begin with. Paradoxically,
if you use a lot of attribution, you create a new voice for
yourself. Rather than positioning yourself as the neutral

39

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 39 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

conduit of neutral information (which doesn’t really exist,

remember!) you create an identity as the understander,
the messenger, or the interpreter of the original text or
texts, passing on the important information to the reader
through the lens of your own reading.

Two Types of Attribution

The most obvious type of attribution you’ll do is to the
original author of a text you read, as discussed in the last
section (“The author says X,” “The author claims X,” etc.).
(By the way, you may be in the habit of literally writing the
words the author, but in higher-level academic writing, it’s
much more common to refer to the author by their name,
which we’ll touch on in a minute.)
However, you may also need to do a kind of “second-
ary” attribution to people the author mentioned and
attributed ideas to in the original text. The author of the
text you read and are summarizing wasn’t just sharing
their own ideas; they probably borrowed some words and
ideas from other people. And now it’s your job not only
to show what you’re borrowing from them, but what they
borrowed from others.
When that happens, the chain of communicating infor-
mation looks like this:

40

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 40 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

This is getting complicated, I know. Now you have to

communicate to your reader that what they’re getting is
fourth-hand information: Person C (the reader) is learning
about Person X’s idea through Person B (you) explaining
how Person A wrote about it.
How can we do this kind of attribution? Diferent style
guides have rules about what’s called “secondary cita-
tions,” but the basic form turns out not to be too hard:

Person A explains that Person X’s argument is ...

Person A interviewed Person X, who claimed that ...

Person A uses Person X’s concept of [whatever] to

show how ...

Boom.

41

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 41 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Using the Author’s Name, Not Just “the Author”

Some people get in the habit of referring to the writer of
a text as “the author.” This might be something that is
taught in high school, or it might just be a habit because
it’s simple and easy to do. It’s not wrong, but it’s also not
precise. Chances are you’ll be writing papers that include
information that comes from a wide variety of authors and
texts, and in this case, referring to the writer of a text sim-
ply as “the author” will be confusing.
Diferent style guides have diferent ways of referring
to writers (more on this in a later section), but you can’t
go wrong with using the writer’s actual name almost every
time you want to refer to them or attribute an idea to
them. I tell my students to use the writer’s real name in
most sentences of a summary, even if it feels repetitive,
and I almost always advise against using the phrase the
author except in cases of multiauthored papers, where it
can get tiresome to repeat several names over and over. In
that case, I usually advise something like this:

Heng Hartse and Kubota (2014) have a diferent view.

Although the authors acknowledge the complexities
of this phenomenon, they also argue that ...

Here, I’ve used the authors’ actual last names (in APA
style), referred to them as “the authors,” and used the pro-
noun they rather than repeating their names. If I continued

42

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 42 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

to refer to Heng Hartse and Kubota’s 2014 paper in this

paragraph, I would probably employ this same mix of
words again, but I would use the actual names more ofen
than the authors.

TL;DR: You should explain that you’re using other

peoples’ ideas as clearly as you can, usually by
mentioning their names a lot. Like a lot.

43

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 43 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Paraphrasing and Quotation

We defined paraphrasing as restating a passage

from a source in fresh language, though sometimes
with keywords retained from that passage.

—Rebecca Moore Howard, Tricia Serviss,

and Tanya K . Rodrigue,
“Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences”

How to Refer to Other People’s Words and Ideas

Some writing guides lump “paraphrasing, summary, and
quotation” together as three ways of explaining other
texts. Really, paraphrasing and quotation are two tools
you can use while doing the larger project of summarizing.
Paraphrasing is writing about the original author’s
ideas using language that is similar enough to the original
to give your reader the information they need but difer-
ent enough that it shows the reader that you understood
and processed the original text. (Remember, your audi-
ence, whoever else you might imagine, is ultimately your
professor, and they want to know that you’re learning the
material.)

44

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 44 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

Quotation is using the exact same words, sentences,

and structures as the original author, and putting those
words inside quotation marks. That’s these little guys:

Using Quotations
“”
How much quotation should you use in a summary? Not
a lot. It depends, but maybe no more than about ten to
twenty percent of your whole text should be quotes. In
general, it’s best to quote only technical explanations, or
definitions of key concepts, or short passages that you
think are so powerful or well-written that you feel the
reader really needs to see them.
It’s important to integrate quotes into your own sen-
tences or paragraphs in a way that explains them in con-
text – you shouldn’t just drop a quote into your paper with
no explanation. Here’s a quick example. Let’s say a stu-
dent is using a quote from a short story by the writer C.D.B.
Bryan called “So Much Unfairness of Things” (1962), which
is about a kid who gets kicked out of a private high school.

NO Sometimes it’s hard to learn important les-

sons. “You will never be able to look back on this and
laugh. But you may be able to understand.”
 There’s no explanation about where the quote comes
from, who wrote or said it, or why it’s being used here.

45

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 45 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

BETTER Sometimes it’s hard to learn important les-

sons. As C.D.B. Bryan wrote in 1962, “You will never
be able to look back on this and laugh. But you may
be able to understand.”
 This helps, because at least we know where the quote
comes from, but it’s still not clearly connected to what-
ever the student is writing about.

EVEN BETTER Sometimes it’s hard to learn import-

ant lessons. Although we may not “be able to look
back” on our mistakes “and laugh,” as C.D.B. Bryan
wrote in “So Much Unfairness of Things” in 1962, we
“may be able to understand” the consequences of
our actions in hindsight.
 The quote is really chopped up here, which might seem
strange if you’re not used to doing it, but it’s perfectly
acceptable to do this in academic writing, and often it’s
a good strategy. The goal is to integrate the quote into
the “flow” of your own sentences and ideas. We will talk
about this a bit more in the next section when we get to
the concept of using sources.

Paraphrasing
Most of your summary should be paraphrasing. Para-
phrasing is “using your own words,” which you have heard
about in school for most of your life. What this does not
mean is the method you might call “using mostly the same

46

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 46 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

words as the original text but changing a few of the import-

ant words.”
If you got into the habit of doing this, you’ll need to
stop, because this is really not OK in university. At best,
it’s seen as unsophisticated; worse, it’s seen as lazy; and
at worst it’s seen as a serious form of plagiarism or cheat-
ing. (We will talk about plagiarism more soon, but I feel like
I should really stress this: sometimes what people think of
as paraphrasing before they get to university is a lot closer
to what university professors think of as plagiarism.)
Paraphrasing, at its best, involves making major chan-
ges in things like which words you use, what order they are
in, what forms those words are in, and how they’re put into
sentences.
Here’s a quick example using the second sentence
of this section, “Really, paraphrasing and quotation are
two tools you can use while doing the larger project of
summarizing.”

1 Truly, paraphrasing and quotation are two things

you can use while doing the bigger project of
summarizing.

2 Your main project is writing a summary, and

there are two strategies you can use to do that:
one is paraphrasing the original text, the other is
quoting some of its exact words.

47

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 47 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

You can see that no. 1 is pretty much the exact same
sentence as the original text, with a few words changed or
removed. No. 2 rearranges the information, changes most
(but not all!) of the words, and even adds some additional
context. No. 2 is much better.
Generally, if you see yourself using more than three or
four words in a row from the original, you should check and
see if there’s another way to rearrange things or change
words. Or you can decide to go ahead and use the exact
words, but as a quotation.

TL;DR: Summarizing includes paraphrasing, which

means presenting the same information but in a very
diferent arrangement of words, and a bit of quota-
tion, which means using the exact same words from
the original, in quotation marks.

48

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 48 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Response

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,

what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

—Joan Didion, “Why I Write”

Telling Readers What You Think about Other Texts

Even though the last few pages talk about summaries as
if they’re always 100 percent objective and your opinion
doesn’t matter, most assignments do involve some sub-
jectivity – that is, providing your own perspective in some
way. There are a lot of diferent ways to describe what we
do when we provide our perspective on other texts. Afer
you read something, you may be asked to do one of the
following:

• respond to

• critique

• criticize

• reflect on

• analyze

• evaluate.

49

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 49 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Whatever your professor calls it, you may encounter

assignments in which you’re asked to say what you think
about something. But you have to do this in a way that bal-
ances your “objective” summary, which shows you under-
stand and can explain the text (the things we talked about
in the last few sections), with your own reactions to it.
First, should you use the word I and phrases like “I
think” or “in my opinion” in your text? Despite what many
high school teachers teach, I is used in high-level academic
writing all the time but is less common in some fields than
others. You can probably tell, for example, from the way
I’ve been using it in this book that I think it’s totally fine to
use I in some contexts, because, I think, it makes the writ-
er seem maybe more friendly or trustworthy or honest or
personal. (I mean, I hope so!)
Don’t try to come up with weird ways to wiggle around
I if you can’t or don’t want to use it; just say what you think.
(Like, instead of “I think dogs are awesome,” just write
“dogs are awesome.”) As usual, you need to get to know
the person who’s grading your assignments to know how
OK it is.
Regardless of whether you use I, what exactly should
you be reacting to? Usually, I recommend two diferent
approaches: responding to ideas and arguments, and
responding to how the ideas are communicated.

50

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 50 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

Responding to ideas and arguments. This is where you

can be direct about agreeing or disagreeing with whatever
main point or points the text is making. I’m going to do an
imaginary example here, so bear with me.
Let’s say the original text is by someone called Gerald
Bookman (I just made him up), and one sentence in it says,

More people are reading e-books today than ever

before, and it’s time for publishers to consider phas-
ing out print books entirely.

I love books, and I would hate to see them die, so if this

were me, I know that at some point I would just come out
and say it, in maybe one of these ways:

“I disagree with Bookman.”

 You can’t get much more direct than that.

“Bookman is wrong.”
 Again – very clear.

“While e-books may be gaining popularity, print

books should not be abandoned.”
 This one is a bit longer, and you’ll notice I didn’t real-
ly make an evaluative judgment of his argument – I just
stated a claim that is opposed to the one he made.

51

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 51 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Any of these might be a good place to start, but I can’t

stop here, because I haven’t explained why I disagree, or
why anybody should listen to what I have to say about this.
Someone could easily reply with a quote from the classic
nineties film The Big Lebowski: “That’s just, like, your opin-
ion, man.”
In other words, you’ve got to be sure you have some-
thing that can do one of the following to your position:

• back it up

• support it

• give evidence for it

• explain it.

Don’t stop at “I agree” or “I disagree.” You need to tell the

reader why you responded the way you did.
What is an acceptable answer to this why? In some
cases, the why will need to have hard evidence behind
it, like statistics, or information from empirical research;
many times, especially in an assignment I call “The Paper,”
which we’ll talk about in the next chapter, you’ll usual-
ly refer to the work of other authors, scholars, or experts
whose positions align more with your own. In some cases,
you may be able to write mainly based on your own life
experiences or deeply held beliefs, or simply try to create
a convincing hypothetical or imagined example that has
the ring of truth.

52

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 52 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

Responding to how ideas are communicated. This can

be trickier, but it’s sometimes better to do than simply say-
ing, “I disagree.”
If you want to explain why you think the writer made
their point in a way that was not efective, or problematic,
or ignorant, you can draw attention to the problems with
their evidence, reasons, explanations, and so on. This can
involve things like pointing out that the writer has failed to
consider other perspectives and what those perspectives
might add, or pointing out that something in the author’s
argument doesn’t make sense or isn’t fair, or that they
didn’t mention something that would be important to con-
sider when thinking about the issue under discussion.
There are other things you can do, but these – respond-
ing to the argument and responding to the way the auth-
or made their argument – are two of the most direct and
simplest things you can do when responding to a text.
Depending on how you feel about the point the original
text made, you can choose one, or you can do a combin-
ation of both.

A Note about Agreeing with the Original Text

Somehow, this feels harder to do well. Maybe it’s because
we’re taught that “critical thinking” is important when we
respond to ideas, and we think being critical means we
have to be negative or disagree. If your professor gives you
a text to respond to, and you think pretty much everything

53

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 53 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

in it seems 100 percent right, but you still have to write five
hundred words, what are you supposed to do? Just write “I
agree with Bookman” over and over? Probably not. I sug-
gest using a modified version of the disagreement-type
strategies mentioned above – you can still provide reasons
and evidence in support of the position of the original text,
and, in fact, you’ll have a lot of things from the text itself to
borrow from. (Not that you want to repeat everything they
said exactly, but you can highlight parts that seem espe-
cially strong and explain why they’re so convincing, from
your own perspective.)
You can also do what Gerald Graf and Cathy Birken-
stein talk about in their book, They Say / I Say, which is to
respond with, “OK, but …” This is a kind of agreement with
a twist. You might agree with some parts of what the ori-
ginal text said, but not all of it.
This gives you the chance to explain your own pos-
ition more directly, but keep in mind the genre of the
assignment. If the main goal is to critically respond to
the original text, you should keep your response root-
ed in the text, bringing up your multisided agreement-
disagreement in relation to specific points made in the
text. Try not to go too far down the path of ofering your
opinion about something only partially related to the ori-
ginal text, however. I’ve seen a few “response” papers that
make this mistake. The writer might begin, “I agree with
Bookman that e-books have many advantages, but paper

54

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 54 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

books are better for children,” which sounds interesting,

but then they go on to write several paragraphs about
how technology has been harmful to children and talk
about television, smartphones, YouTube, and many other
unrelated things until the question of print books has van-
ished altogether.
So don’t do that, but do feel free to have a more
nuanced, double-sided approach, if that’s what makes
sense to you – as long as you keep your response directly
related to the original text’s points. (Maybe you can refer
back to that reverse outline you made of the text while you
were reading it. You did do that, right?)

TL;DR: Many assignments ask for your response to

another text, which you can do by directly agreeing
or disagreeing with or critiquing the original writer’s
argument (with evidence to back up your view). Make
sure that what you do is grounded in the things the
original text says, not just whatever was already in
your head before you started reading.

55

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 55 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Stance

Here I stand; I can do no other.

—Martin Luther*

Using Language to Show Your Position

The last section may have made it sound as if every text
you respond to will be an argumentative one, and that
you might have an argument to make in response to it.
This isn’t strictly true, even if it can be a good way to think
about approaching this kind of assignment. I don’t even
like to use the word argument when I talk about respond-
ing to texts, because argument sounds like a knock-down,
drag-out fight where you explain why your view is abso-
lutely correct and why anyone who disagrees with you is a
big dumb idiot.
That’s how some people think they should write about
opinions, but most academic writing doesn’t really work

*  ccording   to   some   scholars,   Martin   Luther   (the   sixteenth-century 

priest   who   started   the   Protestant   Reformation)   did   not   actually 
say   this,   but   it’s   widely   attributed   to   him,   and   it   looks   good   at   the 
beginning   of   a   chapter   on   “stance.”

56

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 56 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

this way. If you write one thousand words about why

people who disagree with you are wrong and stupid, you’ll
alienate your readers, and you won’t look like a sophis-
ticated thinker or writer.
Instead, I think a better way to think about responding
is to call it a “stance.” I ask questions like this: Where do
you stand in relation to the author? What is your position
relative to the original text?
You’ll notice that this is a metaphor that uses the con-
cept of physical space to explain how you feel about an
idea – imagine yourself at a party or something, and you’re
listening to somebody talk passionately about something
they have a lot to say about. If you find what they’re say-
ing compelling, you might want to move closer to them. If
you find what they’re saying wrong or repulsive, you might
want to get as far away from them as you can. And there
are ways to do that with words.
In his article “The Rhetorical Stance,” scholar Wayne
Booth defines stance as the balance between three things:

• “the available arguments about the subject itself”

• the audience

• the voice of the speaker.

You can show your stance by doing the things I sug-

gested in the last section – being explicit about where you
agree or disagree, and critiquing the way the author makes

57

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 57 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

their points. You can also do it with the language you use,
especially in the following ways:

• Vary the verbs of attribution you use. Writing “Smith

implies X” is tentative and suggests your stance is
maybe farther away from the writer. Writing “Smith
clearly shows X” is more certain and suggests you align
yourself with the author.

• Use adjectives, adverbs, or modal verbs (like might,

could, may, and so on) that signal various degrees of
agreement or certainty when you attribute things to
the author. The chart below has some examples of how
you can do this, but there are many more possibilities.

Language Stance relative to author

Smith unconvincingly attempts Very far away
to show ...
Smith seems to suggest ... Pretty far away
Smith suggests ... Not all that close, but almost
neutral
Smith states ... Neutral
Smith clearly shows ... Pretty close
Smith unequivocally proves ... Very close

TL;DR: You can show your agreement or disagree-

ment with texts not only by just telling your reader
what you think but also by using certain kinds of
words to show whether you align yourself closely
with the original writer or not.

58

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 58 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Plagiarism

Any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser

degree. He is not, af ter all, the first speaker, the one who
disturbs the eternal silence of the universe.

—M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Why We Acknowledge Other People’s Words

People talk about plagiarism a lot at universities, and
it’s important to understand and be careful about it. The
problem is, not everybody agrees on what plagiarism is.
There are some things we can all agree on: you
shouldn’t pay people to write papers for you, or copy your
friend’s paper, or have AI sofware write your paper and
put your name on it. If you turn in a paper with your name
on it but you did 0 percent of the writing, this is – well, it’s
bad. Some people even think of it as stealing. (The Latin
word plagarius means “kidnapper” – using other people’s
words without attribution is apparently as bad as stealing
a child!)
You can get in a lot of trouble if you do this sort of thing.
Some countries have passed laws against companies that

59

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 59 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

advertise “paper-writing services” to university students,

and even if these services are not currently illegal where
you live, it’s almost certainly against your university’s
policy to pay someone to do your assignments.
That doesn’t mean you can never get help with your
writing. There are some grey areas. For example, it’s total-
ly fine to get someone’s help editing your grammar and
spelling, as long as they’re not completely rewriting your
paper. In some cases, you’ll be encouraged to collaborate
with others on some parts of a piece of writing. (My univer-
sity does have a policy against the “unauthorized” use of
an editor, but as ever, this usually depends on the individ-
ual course or instructor.) See the section “Feedback” for
more about this.
So there are usually two diferent things people mean
when they talk about plagiarism. The first is the obvious
cheating-style situation in which the writer did not do
most of the actual writing. The second, which is more com-
mon and somewhat harder to avoid, is the problem of not
suficiently explaining where ideas or words come from.
(This is one reason we use citation styles like MLA and APA,
which we’ll talk about in a bit.)
But where do ideas come from? I’m tempted to quote
another one of my favourite dorky nineties movies, Empire
Records, where a character says, “Who knows where
thoughts come from? They just appear!” Surely we don’t
have to explain how we know every single thing we know

60

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 60 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

and cite a credible expert source on literally every fact we

ever mention. Like, do you need to say, “According to an
article in the Guardian newspaper, Queen Elizabeth II was
the queen of England”? Do you need to cite a biology text-
book when you tell your readers that bananas are a fruit?*
No, you don’t have to provide citations for these
things. Some ideas are so well-known they’re considered
“common knowledge.” In fact, don’t worry too much about
having to provide a reference or a citation for things that
you already had in your head before you started doing
the readings you did for your class or assignment. And in
some science disciplines, it’s important to use the same
language as other texts, like if you’re replicating an experi-
ment and you need to write out the exact name of a chem-
ical compound or a procedure you followed. These aren’t
always cited.
The problem usually comes when you try to ofer a
summary or a close paraphrase of a text to make a new
point. If you’re not careful, your voice can start to blend
with the voice of the original author, and it might look like
you’re claiming that you’re the one who said or thought
something that another writer said or thought.
You probably don’t mean to “steal” words or ideas,
but a general rule to remember is this: if it wasn’t already

*  I   don’t   know   why   you’d   be   saying   this   –   maybe   you’re   writing   a 

paper   about   the   history   of   the   banana   import-export   business.

61

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 61 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

rattling around in your head before you read the text, you
need to attribute and probably cite that information. And
as mentioned in the “Paraphrasing” section, if you find
yourself using more than a few words in a row that are
identical to the original text, you’re going to need to quote
or cite that too.

TL;DR: Not everyone has the same understanding of

what plagiarism means, but when you’re writing in an
academic setting, it’s really important to explain that
you read about an idea in another text.

62

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 62 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Citations

How to Acknowledge Other People’s Words

In academia, we use citation styles for the same reason
we care about plagiarism: it’s really important to clear-
ly explain where words and ideas come from, and these
styles are systematic and widely accepted ways to do that.
Citations are like a trail back to the original source that the
reader can follow if they want to. Human knowledge, all the
way from the ancient philosopher to you, the twenty-first-
century student, has a genealogy, and being clear about
how it works is beneficial to you as a student and a writer,
and to your professor as a teacher, and to any other read-
ers, real or imagined, who might read your paper. Citation
styles are one major way we do this.
There are many diferent styles in diferent fields,
but two big ones you’ll almost definitely come across in
university are MLA (the Modern Language Association,
mostly used in the humanities) and APA (the American
Psychological Association, mostly used in the social sci-
ences). If you know MLA from high school, APA will feel
weird to you, but they’re both fine – just diferent. Chicago
style is also fairly common in some fields.

63

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 63 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

The two main things you should know about are

• in-text citations: found in the body of your paper

• references: the full information about the resource you

used, found at the end of the paper in a list.

Here’s what you need to know.

How to Use In-Text Citations, and Where to Look

for Help If You Forget How
For APA style, you need to remember three things:

• author’s last name

• year of publication

• page number.

An APA in-text citation looks something like this, although

you can mix and match what goes in the parentheses and
what goes in the actual sentence:

He later explains that “anyone who disagrees with

you is a big dumb idiot” (Heng Hartse, 2022, p. 56).

For MLA style, generally you just need

• author’s last name

• page number.

64

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 64 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

Also, MLA does not use “p.” to introduce the page number,
and it doesn’t put a comma between the name and the
number, both of which are diferent from APA. An MLA cita-
tion looks something like this:

He later explains that “anyone who disagrees with

you is a big dumb idiot” (Heng Hartse 56).

Notice that for both APA and MLA, the period at the end
of the sentence comes afer the parenthesis. This can look
weird if you’re not used to it, but it’s correct!
In Chicago style, in-text citations have the author’s
last name and the date, but also a comma before the page
number, and no “p.” in front of it. Kind of like a mix of MLA
and APA:

He later explains that “anyone who disagrees with

you is a big dumb idiot” (Heng Hartse 2022, 56).

If you forget how to do this or encounter a unique situ-

ation, I suggest searching for “APA style guide” or “MLA
style guide,” and so on, on the internet. Most organiza-
tions that have citation styles have their own websites that
give advice on unique situations. You can also buy paper or
electronic copies of the oficial style manuals, which I high-
ly recommend because they’re the most comprehensive
guides, but if you’d rather not buy one, university libraries

65

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 65 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

ofen have good free, short guides to the most common

situations you’ll face with APA and MLA style.

How to Figure Out How to Copy Automatically

Formatted References
I really don’t think you need to learn how to write refer-
ences from scratch anymore. There are many ways to do
this automatically, and they’ve gotten much better in
recent years. You can look up how to correctly put an edit-
ed book or journal article or podcast in your list of sources
(placed at the end of your paper – what APA and Chicago
call “References” and MLA calls “Works Cited”), but hon-
estly, most of the time, you don’t have to look it up and
type it all out yourself.
Instead, all you have to do is find the place on what-
ever library database or academic search engine you’re
using that will give you an automatic citation. In recent
years, the most common symbol for automatically gen-
erated references has become a little box with quotation
marks inside it, or just the word Cite. This will be a small
button or link near the basic information about the arti-
cle. Find this, click it, then copy the reference (in whatever
style) and paste it into your References or Works Cited.
This list should be in alphabetical order by the author’s
last name.
You may find there are errors with the automatic cita-
tions from time to time; specifically, the way they capitalize

66

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 66 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Reading and Writing about Other Texts

(or don’t capitalize) the titles of books or articles can difer

from what the style guide calls for. Here’s a quick rule to
remember.

APA à Sentence case

MLA and Chicago à Headline or title case

APA. Titles of articles and books are in what is called “sen-

tence case,” meaning you only capitalize the first letter
of the title, any proper nouns in the title, and the first let-
ter afer a colon or other punctuation mark. However, the
titles of academic journals are in what is called “title case,”
meaning that every word except for prepositions (like of or
in) and articles (like a or the) is capitalized. Here’s a journal
article in APA style:

Drake, C. A. (1941). Why students cheat. Journal of

Higher Education, 12(8), 418–20.

MLA. Unlike in APA style, titles of everything in MLA style

are in what is called “headline or title case.” Here’s the
same example:

Drake, Charles A. “Why Students Cheat.” Journal of

Higher Education vol. 12, no. 8 (1941), pp. 418–20.

67

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 67 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Chicago. This style is pretty similar to MLA style, with a few

variations.

Drake, Charles A. “Why Students Cheat.” Journal of

Higher Education 12, no. 8 (1941): 418–20.

You’ll notice each style has diferent ways of showing

you the volume and issue number of journals: “12(8)” in
APA, “vol. 12, no. 8” in MLA, and “12, no. 8” in Chicago all
mean “volume 12, issue 8” of the journal. I don’t think you
need to know a whole lot about this unless you plan to go
to graduate school, but don’t worry – the information is
out there if you need it, and somewhere on your campus
right now there’s a reference librarian who can’t wait to
help you figure it out if you want.

TL;DR: MLA, APA, and Chicago style citations are

ways we show where the stuf we’re writing about
comes from. They’re diferent, and you can learn
more from the internet about whichever one you’re
using. Automatic citations are your friend, but they’re
not always right.

68

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 68 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 THREE

Writing “The Paper”

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 69 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 What “The Paper” Is

Papers are chances to take care of

little pieces of your soul.

—Luke Reinsma, during a class I took from him

What’s a “paper” in university? It depends (surprise!) on

what your professor says, what class you’re in, and what
the assignment is.
If you’re in a first-year writing or composition course,
you’ll probably be assigned what is ofen called a “research
paper,” or what we called a “paper from sources” in the
“Genre” section of this book. In its most basic form, this
is a piece of writing that will make a point about some
issue related to the course. Your professor may give you a
“topic” (this is a word I don’t like, which I’ll explain later),
or you might have to choose your own.
This may feel, like many first-year writing assignments,
a bit fake. In real life, you’re almost never put in a situation
where your boss at work, or whoever, says, “Write some-
thing!” And you ask, “What should I write?” And they say,
“I don’t care. Just make an argument about whether drugs
should be legalized, or climate change, or something!”

71

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 71 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

If this is how you felt when you got your “paper” assign-
ment, I’m sorry. When I was in college, I had a professor
who told us that writing a paper was a chance to take care
of a little piece of your soul, which is something I really
liked. He was giving us the freedom to pursue something
that might matter to us, to approach a problem that both-
ered us, to learn about something we wanted to learn
more about. Ideally, any writing assignment will at least
have some part of that in it.
So, here’s how a paper – which from now on I will refer
to in title case, as The Paper, to make it look more import-
ant – usually emerges:

1 You’re studying a certain subject or academic disci-

pline, or have at least done some readings about a cer-
tain issue or problem, in one of your courses.

2 You’re given an assignment to write a longish text relat-

ed to that subject or discipline or issue or problem.
(The definition of longish varies. The Paper is usually
more than two or three pages. In some courses, it may
be around four or five pages, or 1,000 to 2,000 words;
in others, especially in your upper-year courses,
you may get up into the eight- or ten- or fifeen-page
territory.) This assignment usually comes in the second
half of a course and is usually one of the final assign-
ments you turn in, ofen for a large chunk of your grade.

72

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 72 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

3 Usually for this assignment, you need to do more

reading about the specific thing you’re writing about.
Your professor might have a handful of readings you’re
meant to draw from; more ofen, you may have to find
these on your own.

4 You need to figure out how to write about the thing in

a way that expresses a position or stance or argument
(that is, your “original” idea, in some way) by using or
drawing on the texts you read in step no. 3 or no. 1 or
both.

5 You need to find a way to make The Paper coherent

and cohesive – one whole thing rather than a lot of
little unrelated parts or a list of semi-related points or
ideas.

Numbers 1 and 2 are pretty simple, and the course you’re

in will usually prepare you for them well. Numbers 3, 4, and
5 are a bit more complicated. We’ll review them in the com-
ing sections.

TL;DR: In a lot of classes, you have to write a long

paper that uses academic articles, books, or book
chapters as sources to make a somewhat original
point about something related to the class.

73

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 73 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Structure

Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell them. Tell ’em.

Tell ’em what you told ’em.

—Mr. Ulmen, my Grade 7 English teacher

(and probably thousands of teachers throughout history)

Make the Paper Do What You Say It’s Going to Do

We’ve already talked about genre, and this is the part of the
book where I should tell you about some diferent genres
or types of The Paper. I’m not sure I really want to do this,
however. Usually, a book like this would list diferent types
of papers you could write, with diferent structures:

• argumentation: trying to prove a point or persuade the

reader that something is true

• comparison: showing how two things are alike or

diferent

• cause and efect: explaining the cause(s) of something

• problem and solution: proposing and evaluating vari-

ous solutions to a particular problem

74

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 74 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

• narrative: telling a story about something

• exposition: explaining or ofering information about

some phenomenon.

These can be helpful ways to think about diferent pur-

poses your paper might have, but I’m not going to go into
detail about each of them, for a few reasons.
First, The Paper is not a stable enough genre for me to
be able to break it down into all these diferent categories
and tell you how to write each one. People who teach writ-
ing classes, or classes that involve writing a paper, have
many diferent opinions about how to write The Paper and
what it should include.
For example, I don’t really think cause and efect is a
real genre; I think it’s actually just an argumentative paper,
because the purpose of a cause-and-efect paper is to per-
suade a reader that Thing B has various causes: X, Y, and
Z. In a way, they’re all just argumentative papers, because
usually the purpose of The Paper is to make a point about
something that the reader might not have known or
believed or considered before.
But even good argumentative papers shouldn’t really
be argumentative in the “let’s fight with words” way that
our culture, especially on the internet, seems to demand.
I think we would all be better writers, and just better
people, if we could tone down what the rhetoric scholar
Robert Connors (and others) calls “agonistic” writing –

75

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 75 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

that kind of hardcore “debate” style that looks to score

points and win arguments by crushing the loser with a
deadly blow of reasoning. We could instead embrace what
he (and others) call the “irenic” style, one that attempts
to do its persuasion by means of consensus-building and
seeking peace. But maybe that’s just me.
My other reasons for not giving you cheat sheets for
these diferent genres or structures is that they’re overly
simplistic. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen a good aca-
demic paper I would categorize as only argumentative, or
only comparative, and so on.
Honestly, I still believe the basic structure of most aca-
demic papers is as simple as my Grade 7 English teacher,
Mr. Ulmen, taught us:

1 Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em.

2 Tell ’em.

3 Tell ’em what you told ’em.

I ofen tell students that they can organize their papers

however they want, as long as they have declared a clear pur-
pose, and the paper makes good on the declared purpose.
I think of this as the paper following its own “internal logic.”
What does that mean? Of course, the things you write
about should all be related to the thesis statement, and
we’ll talk more about this soon. But on an even more sur-
face level, I really think you should come out and declare

76

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 76 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

things clearly and obviously. You don’t have to say it exact-

ly this way, but I honestly think papers should say some-
thing like this:

My purpose in writing this paper is to explain why

[Thing X] has been misunderstood by people who
believe [Idea Y], and how current research in
[Discipline C] clearly shows that [Thing Y is wrong
and Idea Z makes more sense]. First, I’ll explain the
history of [Thing X] and how historical and cultur-
al influences have made it the way it is. Then I’ll
explore the debates and disagreements between
[people who believe Idea Y and people who believe
Idea Z]. I’ll also show how [Idea Z] can help us solve
[Problems A and B with Thing X] and gives us hope-
ful new ideas for how to deal with [Thing X] in the
future, even as [Problems A and B, and even possible
New Problems D and E] exist.

I just made this structure up. You may not want to write
about something that is misunderstood, or its history, or
the other things I wrote. And, of course, all the stuf with
letters would be real things in a real paper. But what I want
to draw your attention to here is laying out all your cards
on the table for the reader – give a clear map or blueprint
or plan of what you plan to do in the paper and make sure
you go on to follow it. We’ll talk more about this later.

77

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 77 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

TL;DR: The Paper can have many diferent purposes

and structures, but as long as you explain what
you’re going to do and actually follow through on it,
you should be OK.

Creating an Outline (If You Want To)

You don’t always need to write an outline, but sometimes
your professor will ask you to. Use this as an opportunity
to do some work that will help you organize your thoughts
and help your instructor know what you plan to write
about so they can ofer you some advice.
If you do do an outline, you need to have done a lot of
reading, because the outline needs to ofer some idea of
both the content and structure of your paper.
In terms of content, it’s important to have some idea of
what you want to say, rather than just an outline that says,
“First, I’ll introduce something, then make a point about
it, then make another point about it, and then conclude
the paper.” That doesn’t really help you plan your paper, or
help your prof help you.
There are a lot of ways to structure a paper, and you
shouldn’t feel tied to a specific one. Many people are used
to Intro | Three-Paragraph Body | Conclusion, which can be
OK, but it is equally fine to have just two body paragraphs
for a short paper, or seven or ten or more for a longer
paper. The important thing is that every part of The Paper
needs to clearly feel like it’s related to the stated purpose
of The Paper, which is usually the thesis statement.

78

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 78 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

Don’t worry about making your outline perfect, and

don’t feel you absolutely must stick to it. If something you
planned to write about in your outline isn’t working, you
can abandon it once you start writing.

TL;DR: An outline is a map of your paper, and it can

help you make sure that everything in the paper fits
together well. The more detailed it is, the more it will
help.

79

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 79 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Topic

[Students] have to invent the university by assembling and

mimicking its language, finding some compromise between
idiosyncrasy, a personal history, and the requirements of
convention, the history of a discipline.

—Donald Bartholomae, “Inventing the University”

Moving from a Topic to a Question

In some guides to academic writing, they call the first stage
of the writing process – the part where you figure out what
to write about – “invention.”
This term has never quite made sense to me, because
when you’re starting university, you usually don’t have much
freedom to just invent something to write about out of thin
air. More ofen than not, your instructor will have some
guidelines regarding what it is you’re meant to write about.
A lot of people call this your “topic,” but I also don’t
think this term is useful.
The main reason I don’t like topics is that this term
encourages us to oversimplify things. People tend to talk
about topics in extremely broad and nonspecific language.

80

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 80 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

So if your topic is, I don’t know, climate change, and you’re

not sure where to begin, you’ll type climate change into a
search engine or database and get 1,620,000,000  results
and still have no idea where to begin. Plus, what can you
learn or discover or explain about the generic topic of cli-
mate change that can’t be done in a five-minute skim of a
Wikipedia page? “The climate is changing because of pol-
lution, which is bad.” Ten words. Now what?
Also, when you start searching for resources, you might
get a bunch of results from diferent perspectives. If your
topic is global pandemics (something pretty much every-
one in the world was interested in when I started writ-
ing this book, and something we’ll all probably be inter-
ested in for years to come) and you type some relevant
terms into an academic database, you might find infor-
mation from medical researchers, virologists, epidemiol-
ogists, sociologists, psychologists, and historians. Do you
need all of these perspectives? They’re definitely all valu-
able in their own way, but it’s also possible that trying to
cram them all into a paper will result in something confus-
ing and incoherent, and you might end up with too many
diferent conversations with too many diferent audiences.
Plus, your history professor might not think you need to
cite the virologists, and your biology professor might not
think you need to cite the historians.
So the problem with thinking about topics is that topics
can be vague, confusing, and, ofen, just bland and boring.

81

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 81 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Instead, try to think of your paper as addressing a prob-

lem or a question that you can answer in the scope of a few
(or however many) pages.
If you find that you have to start with a big topic, try to
focus on a small part of it, and find an interesting question
you can ask about that small part. Narrow and narrow and
narrow down your idea for a paper. Use your own experi-
ence, interests, and desires to hone in on a tiny little piece
of a bigger issue.
Let’s look at an example of narrowing:

Big, boring, generic topic: language and society

 It’s unlikely you’ll get a topic this broad on an assign-
ment, but I had to pick one I know something about.

Narrower: the use of Chinese in North America

 This is already way better. We have a pretty good idea
of what we’re focusing on now, although there are still
a lot of diferent angles one could take: Is this going to
be a paper about the teaching of Chinese at American
schools and colleges? Or bilingualism in the Chinese
Canadian community? Or the linguistic landscape of
airports that use English, Chinese, French, and other
languages on signs? Those are just a few possibilities.
We need to keep narrowing.

82

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 82 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

Narrower still: bilingual Chinese-English education

programs in western Canada
 OK, we’re getting pretty specific now, and this is start-
ing to sound interesting. Still, depending on what course
this paper is for, there are still some diferent approach-
es we might take. Do you want to talk about teaching
methods? Do you want to say something about equity
and access to language education for people from dif-
ferent backgrounds? Do you want to compare historical
influences on British Columbia’s and Alberta’s educa-
tion systems?

Now let’s turn the narrower topic into an answerable ques-

tion. Not all of these are going to be great – I’m just throw-
ing out ideas at this point.

• What is the history of bilingual education in British

Columbia, and how does Chinese fit into it?

• What teaching methods do bilingual kindergarten

teachers use in Canada?

• How has Alberta handled the demand for Chinese and

other languages in its bilingual education programs?

• How are French-language education and Chinese-

language education diferent and/or similar in British
Columbia?

83

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 83 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

I don’t know how to find the answers to these ques-

tions yet. But if I have a question, I’m ready to start trying
to figure out how I can answer it.

TL;DR: Try not to start with a big, broad, generic

“topic” for your paper but think instead of a problem
you’d like to solve or a question you’d like to answer.

84

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 84 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Sources

Writing from sources is what we do in university.

—Doug Brent, “The Research Paper

and Why We Should Still Care”

At some point during the writing of The Paper, you’ll prob-

ably need to do your own digging for sources.
As usual, your first course of action should be checking
the parameters of the assignment. Reread the directions
carefully, and if you’re still not clear, ask a classmate, a TA,
or writing centre tutor, or someone you trust who’s an aca-
demic “insider” – that is, someone who knows the game of
writing for university and ideally knows something about
the area you’re writing in. In some cases, your prof might
have parameters like telling you to only use certain jour-
nals, or certain databases, when you look for sources.

Tips on Finding Sources

There are two places you might look: your university’s
library website and Google Scholar. They both work OK,
but Google Scholar is likely to be more familiar to you at

85

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 85 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

first. However, Google changed its motto from “Don’t

Be Evil” to something else in 2015, which should tell you
something. And I assume your university library is not a
giant for-profit corporation whose main goal is collecting
personal information about you in order to sell advertis-
ing, but that’s not the point.
Here’s the problem you’re going to run into, Google or
no Google: TOO MUCH INFORMATION. Seriously. Scholarly
publishing has exploded in the last twenty or thirty years,
and no one can keep up with all the published research in
any field anymore. It’s simply not possible to read even a
tiny fraction of what is published in any area in any given
year. The best most of us can do is to read important foun-
dational texts in our fields and to keep up with some of the
best-known and most well-respected academic journals
that cover our disciplines, and even that is not easy.
To make matters worse, there has also been an explo-
sion of poor-quality academic research. It’s too compli-
cated to explain the reasons why here, but there are thou-
sands of poorly written, poorly argued, and inaccurate
academic articles available in any keyword search you
might be interested in, and it can be hard to spot them.
(More on this later.)
What should you do when faced with this firehose of
information? Here are some rules that are not always 100
percent accurate but should help:

86

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 86 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

• Make sure your sources are recent, usually within the

last ten or twenty years. It’s diferent if your assign-
ment requires you to do historical or archival research,
of course, and in some cases, you’ll need to read older
texts in order to understand historical perspectives
on the phenomena you’re studying, but it’s import-
ant to know what the important issues are in the area
currently.

• Make sure most of your sources are academic. Hot tip:

If you’re going to Google, use Google Scholar (scholar.
google.com) not regular Google (google.com) – always!
What makes a source “academic”? According to
Wikipedia, an academic publication is one “in which
scholarship relating to a particular academic disci-
pline is published.” Usually, these are academic jour-
nals or books, but sometimes they can be things like
preprint repositories, which are websites that host
papers written by researchers before they’re published
in academic journals (a site called arXiv is a popular
example of this). Some nonacademic sources from
credible institutions are ofen OK: the New York Times
or a university-afiliated website or a well-known think
tank would be all right, as long as they are balanced
out by other academic sources. A random teenager’s
TikTok account would not be a good source to use in a
research paper.

87

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 87 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

• Use a lot of diferent combinations of keywords in your

searches. Your first idea for a search term might not
be the word experts in that area use. Cheating is one
way to talk about something, but academic dishonesty
or academic misconduct or academic integrity might
get you further. Try to figure out what the people who
research this thing call it. Oh, and if your keywords
are a phrase, be sure to put them all inside quotation
marks.

• Read titles and skim abstracts and reference lists.

Find which articles look interesting or relevant from
their titles, then read their abstracts to see if they fit
what you’re looking for. Read a lot of abstracts. Read,
like, fifeen or twenty, even if you’re only looking for
three or four good sources. Skim the reference lists of
articles that you like, and look up a few articles with
interesting titles. Repeat this until you’ve got as many
good-quality articles as you can handle reading, or at
least skimming.

• Make sure the journals you’re looking at are part of the

conversation your professor wants you to be learning
about. This can be hard to do. If you’re in an education
course that takes a more qualitative, social approach
to student well-being, you might not want to look for
many articles that take a more quantitative, “hard
numbers” approach to student success. In addition,

88

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 88 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

you need to watch out for journals that are outside the
mainstream academic conversation your professor is
hoping to teach you about. This is such a tricky thing
to navigate that the next section is going to deal with it
in more detail.

TL;DR: Try to find a lot of high-quality, recent journal

articles that are relevant to the thing you’re writing
about.

Tips on Making Sure Your Sources Are Credible

Credibility just means whether a source can be believed
or trusted – in this case, in an academic context. There
are two problems you might run into when it comes to
credibility:

• finding sources that seem relevant to what you want to

write about but that are not appropriate for an aca-
demic paper

• finding sources that seem relevant to what you want

to talk about and seem to be from legitimate academ-
ic publishers but are actually from low-quality or scam
publications.

The first one is simpler to talk about. For a few reasons,

there are some kinds of sources that aren’t used in aca-
demic writing. For example, a tabloid newspaper like the

89

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 89 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Daily Mail has a bad reputation for publishing sensation-

al celebrity gossip that may or may not be true. Similarly,
it usually isn’t OK to use a random person’s blog, person-
al website, or social media account as a source to prove a
point or as evidence that something you’re writing about
is true. Even more trustworthy media sources like news-
papers, magazines, or news websites aren’t usually the
main sources used in academic writing, though they cer-
tainly can be used in some disciplines. Why is this?
In the academic world, the currency of credibility
is something we call “peer review.” It isn’t perfect, but
it helps to assure the quality and trustworthiness of the
knowledge produced by research. This is how the peer
review process works:

1 A researcher engages in a project according to the

standards of their discipline (we get trained on how to
do this, ofen for years).

2 They write about what they learned in their project.

3 They submit the article or book they wrote to an aca-

demic journal or book publisher.

4 The publisher sends the article or book out to two,

three, or four respected scholars who work in the
same field as the researcher – almost always without
the researcher’s name on it, so they can judge it fairly
– and those people write reviews. They evaluate things

90

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 90 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

like whether the research methods were followed

correctly, whether the theory the researcher used
makes sense, whether the conclusions they came to
make sense, and whether the claims they make about
the thing they studied are warranted.

This process isn’t always 100 percent perfect. Every

once in a while, someone submits a fake article as a joke,
and it gets published, and every once in a while, there are
big disagreements among scholars about whether a paper
was really good enough to be published. But the process
goes a long way in making sure that the research published
is done well, and in good faith, and can be trusted. Peer-
reviewed papers and books written by scholars who work
at well-known, respected universities throughout the
world tend to be the types of conversations your own pro-
fessors are involved in, and they tend to produce the type
of knowledge that they hope you’ll learn.
The reason I keep saying “Google Scholar, not regu-
lar Google” is that if you use regular Google, you’ll get a
ton of resources that look relevant and useful but are not
peer reviewed and are generally not used by specialists,
researchers, and scholars in the area you’re learning about.
This doesn’t mean that the information in those sources is
always bad (sometimes it is, though!). It just means it’s not
part of that academic conversation we talked about.

91

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 91 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

There’s also another, newer problem with credibility,

which is that in the last ten years or so there are hundreds
and hundreds of new academic journals that aren’t cred-
ible, for a few reasons:

• Some journals exploit writers, charging high fees to

scholars who are desperate to publish their work.

• Some of those journals don’t have good peer review

practices and publish almost anything, even if it’s total
garbage.

• Some of those journals misrepresent their location,

who their editors are, and other such things in order to
seem more “international” than they really are.

• Some newer journals, even if they’re more credible

and are not attempting to just make money of writers,
have lower standards than others and might publish
work that is poorly written or poorly researched.

I don’t have a foolproof solution about how to tell

a scam journal from a good journal. My suggestions
would be this. If an article has a lot of citations, chan-
ces are it’s worth at least looking at. You can see this on
Google Scholar underneath the info about the article on
the search page – it will say “cited by 4” or “cited by 853,”
etc. But don’t always accept an article’s credibility at face
value. If something seems “of,” like the website is poor-
ly designed or there are a lot of language mistakes in the

92

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 92 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

article, it might not be trustworthy. When in doubt, ask an

academic “insider” for some advice.

TL;DR: Peer-reviewed academic texts are mainly

what you should use for sources. However, there are
some low-quality academic articles out there, so
you’ve got to be careful.

How to Use Sources Once You’ve Found Them

We’ve already talked about how to paraphrase and quote
other texts, but what does it actually mean to “use” the
three or four or fifeen (or whatever) sources you’ve found
and have been reading for your paper?
Sometimes it’s easier to say what not to do. There are
two extremes that people tend to fall into.

Quote mining. This is where you skim through a reading

until you find a sentence or phrase that looks like it sup-
ports whatever you already believe, and you pluck it out
and drop it into your paper without really explaining it. Then
you do this again with four or five more sources. You’re lef
with a paper that’s really just a bunch of stuf you made up
without thinking too much, and without much real support
aside from a few awkwardly shoved-in quotes.

Accidentally writing a literature review. This is where

you write a bunch of summaries of academic texts when

93

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 93 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

the assignment isn’t a literature review. (A literature review,

which is a comprehensive series of summaries of relevant
articles about a given subject, is usually more of an upper-
year or grad school assignment.) The problem here is that
your paper is no longer thesis-driven. It becomes a list of
summaries of every reading you did but with an introduc-
tion and a conclusion slapped on either end. Unlike the
quote-mining paper, the accidental literature review has
almost none of your own ideas in it.

Instead of falling into these extremes, a paper that uses

its sources well will look like the product of an encounter
between you and the texts you’ve read. You come to a topic
(or idea or problem) with an interest in it and some ideas
about what you might want to say, but you allow the texts
you read to shape your understanding, and you enter into
a kind of conversation with them – a conversation guided
by a purpose you choose, even though it may change as
you write. Think of the process looking this way:

1 You’ve got an initial idea of what you want to write

about, because you’ve already done the course read-
ings and taken notes on them, and you’ve got a prob-
lem or question or even something resembling a thesis
statement.

2 You find some more relevant sources and read them

while taking notes.

94

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 94 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

3 You think about what you read and allow it to help you
edit or change your thesis statement.

4 You start writing about the thing you want to say, and
as you explain and expand on your points, you sum-
marize and paraphrase parts of the sources that add
something meaningful to your point.

5 As you write, you allow the stuf in the readings to

influence and change your main points, arguments,
and ideas. Maybe you start thinking one thing and
realize it’s more complicated or diferent than you
thought, so your paper changes as a result. This is a
good thing – in fact, it’s the whole point. In the pro-
cess of reading and writing, you’re also learning and
thinking.

TL;DR: Your paper should be driven by your own

ideas and purposes, employing a combination of
quotes, paraphrases, and references to other texts
that help to make sense of what you’re saying. This is
not always easy to do well, and you’ll change what
you write, and what you think, as you go.

95

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 95 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Thesis Statements

The defining characteristics of a high quality thesis

statement seem arbitrary and subjective.

—Daniel Chang, “What ’s within a Thesis Statement?”

Explaining Your Point in One Sentence

Thesis statements are another one of those things that
everyone thinks are important but that people have
trouble defining. Usually, a thesis statement is the final
sentence of The Paper’s introduction, and it expresses the
main focus of the paper as a whole.
The Paper is almost always thesis-driven, meaning that
it has a clearly defined main purpose, something it’s trying
to do. (Well, something you, the writer, are trying to do.)
As we’ve discussed, usually that thing is referred to as
“making an argument” or “proving a point” or otherwise
persuading a reader about something. Remember, this
doesn’t have to be a capital-A argument of the “I’m right,
and you’re stupid” variety. Ofen, the thesis is more com-
plex than a simple black-or-white argument.

96

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 96 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

The thesis statement can be the outcome of the nar-

rowing process I described in the “Topic” section. Let’s
try that again, but instead of coming up with a question,
let’s try to answer it by creating a thesis statement. We
will start with an overly simple statement, using one of
my favourite issues, academic integrity. I’m going to try
to write a series of thesis statements starting with gener-
al, vague, bad ones and gradually make them better using
my own interests and what I’ve learned by skimming rel-
evant readings.

BAD Academic integrity is important.

 Too general.

STILL BAD Academic integrity is important for uni-

versities today.
 Still not good but at least it provides some context.

NOT GREAT Universities should not harshly punish

students who violate academic integrity.
 At least it shows a strong position on the issue.

BETTER Universities should be more specific about

how they define academic integrity violations.
 Getting more specific now.

97

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 97 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

EVEN BETTER University policies need to more clear-

ly define plagiarism so students are not unfairly pun-
ished for making mistakes.
 Still uses somewhat generic language.

REALLY GOOD Universities need clearer policies about

how plagiarism is defined, and they need to take a
teaching-oriented approach to dealing with cases
of plagiarism rather than a punishment-oriented
approach. Most plagiarism cases are the result of
ignorance of the norms of academic communication
rather than intentionally deceptive violations of the
rules.
 Clear context, stance, reasoning, and specificity.

You don’t have to know exactly what your thesis state-

ment is when you start writing, but doing something like
this at the beginning of the process will help. You will prob-
ably change it as you continue to read and write, and that’s
OK.

TL;DR: The thesis statement comes at the end of

your first paragraph (that is, the introduction) and is
a single sentence that says what your paper is about
as clearly as possible.

98

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 98 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Introductions

I don’t know where to begin.

—Death Cab for Cutie, “No Room in Frame”

How to Begin
The introduction is the first paragraph of The Paper, and
it ofers a general-to-specific explanation of the things
you’re going to be writing about. Usually, your introduc-
tion should function like an upside-down triangle, with
the wide part at the top representing general information
about the broad domain or topic the paper will touch on,
and the point at the bottom representing the specific area
of your focus. Here’s a generic version of what it could look
like. (Bonus: the whole intro looks like a big arrow pointing
to the rest of your paper, which is kind of what it is!)

99

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 99 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

There are other ways to do it, but you can’t go wrong

with this. For the fat part of the triangle at the top, though,
don’t start with a dictionary definition. Professors hate
that.
The last part of the introduction paragraph should
usually include the thesis statement and/or a brief sketch
of the structure of the paper – like a blueprint or a map of
what the reader can expect.
As mentioned earlier, I really believe this second point
is the most important part of the paper. If this sketch is
wrong, the whole paper will seem like it didn’t do what it
was supposed to. It’s got to actually match what comes
in the rest of the paper. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to either
change this part or change the rest of the paper.

TL;DR: Move from general to specific in an introduc-

tion and end with a thesis statement and a map of
where the paper is going to go.

100

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 100 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Paragraphs

Putting Together Sentences

The paragraphs in the middle of The Paper are usually
called “body paragraphs.” I don’t know why.
A paragraph is just a bunch of sentences about a par-
ticular thing, put together. It doesn’t really matter how
long a paragraph is, but in an academic paper, if you’re
under about three sentences, they usually look too short,
and if you’re over about ten, they look too long. (A para-
graph that is longer than a page is almost never a good
idea. It’s too easy for a reader to get lost without the visual
cues of indentation when a new idea begins.) The senten-
ces in a paragraph should be related in some way; the sen-
tence at the beginning of the paragraph usually sums up
the basic idea of the paragraph – this is called the “topic
sentence.” It helps to think of the topic sentence as a mini-
thesis statement, since it should relate back to your overall
thesis statement in some way.
Paragraphs are useful for signalling to your reader
where you’re going with your ideas. Breaking up text into
visually readable chunks is even more important to read-
ers today than, say, thirty years ago. In fact, the expression

101

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 101 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

TL;DR (remember?) is most ofen used in order to summar-

ize giant paragraphs of text no one wants to read on the
internet.
If we had to come up with a formula for where para-
graph breaks should go, it would be something like this:

There have already been a lot of

sentences in this paragraph
+
it looks like a new idea of
some kind is starting now
=
paragraph break.

It depends on your prof’s guidelines, but usually you’ll

want to create paragraphs by indenting and not putting a
line space between paragraphs. And don’t do both; it looks
weird.
Use the “tab” key on your computer keyboard to indent
and make a paragraph break. Do not create indentations
by hitting the space bar a bunch of times. It’ll really mess
everything up.
You might have written five-paragraph essays in high
school, but it doesn’t matter how many body paragraphs
there are in a paper. There could be two or three or seven
or eighteen depending on the requirements of the assign-
ment and the purpose of the paper. It just matters that

102

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 102 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

your paragraphs make points that are directly related to

the paper’s overall purpose as laid out in the thesis state-
ment. Some people say you need to have a separate para-
graph that introduces a “counterargument,” but if you’re
writing in such a way that you’re always in “conversation”
with your sources, I don’t think this is necessary (unless
your instructor has really specific requirements).

TL;DR: Paragraphs are collections of related senten-

ces and shouldn’t be too long. You can have as many
as you want as long as they’re clearly related to the
paper’s overall purpose.

10 3

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 103 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Conclusions

How to End
Conclusions aren’t easy to write. Somehow it seems hard
to sum up everything you’ve said so far in a meaningful
way without repeating yourself or seeming overly self-
important. I hate writing conclusions so much that I usual-
ly don’t even label anything “conclusion” when I write an
academic article, and I hope no one notices. But a piece of
writing has to end somewhere.
Usually, a conclusion is a paragraph (or several para-
graphs, in a longer paper) that does two things.

Summarize. A conclusion reminds readers about what

you just said in the paper. It can be hard to do this without
repeating yourself, but if you use some strategies that we
talk about in the sections on paraphrasing and cohesion,
you should be able to get through this with just a bit of lan-
guage reuse. The goal is to re-emphasize your main points
and purpose.

Synthesize. A conclusion makes it all come to some

new, final, emerging insight. (Don’t introduce brand new

10 4

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 104 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

evidence or examples or supporting information, though.)

It’s like the flower that grows out of the dirt of the paper, or,
to continue the plant metaphor, the garden that grows from
the soil of the rest of the paper. It’s made of the same stuf,
but it emerges as something new. You might also think of
synthesis sentences as answering questions like these:

• So what?

• Who cares?

• What should happen next, given [everything I said in

this paper]?

• Given [everything I said in this paper], what is import-

ant to know or do?

• What should people who just read this paper be think-

ing about now?

You can think of the end of the paper as a kind of call to

action. You don’t have to be super dramatic about it, but
try to show your readers why what you wrote might matter
in the real world. It doesn’t even have to be a real action –
it can just be a suggestion for them to think more carefully
about something.
Here are a few examples of conclusions I wrote when
I was a student – I’ll give you the last sentence or two of
three papers. I’m not going to promise that they’re perfect,
but I got OK grades.

105

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 105 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Augustine’s Confessions do just what they set out to

accomplish: we learn by Augustine’s example. In his
spiritual journey we can see more clearly our own.
 I wrote this as a first-year undergraduate, and it seems
OK. I can see how a reader might be intrigued about this
and want to read the book.

For the sake of our students, a conversation must

begin among ESL writing teachers, researchers, and
administrators about how we understand the con-
cept of culture and whether traditional understand-
ings are adequate. We must begin to change. The
world has.
 This is the final section of my master’s thesis. I’ll be
honest, it’s pretty cringe. It’s unnecessarily dramatic. Yet
I do think it’s doing something a conclusion should: giv-
ing one final push to the reader that says, “You should
care about this!”

China remains one of the most important centres of

language teaching and learning in the world, and the
future will bring new innovations in the way foreign
teachers are integrated into its massive project of
English education.
 I wrote this as a PhD student, and I think it’s pretty
good – it’s a lot less dramatic than the above, and it
seems like it would make readers interested in learning

106

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 106 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

more about what’s going to happen in the near future in

this area.

TL;DR: The conclusion should remind readers of your

main points without repeating them exactly or
introducing new information, and it should leave
them with a sense of why what you said matters.

107

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 107 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Flow

Coherence and Cohesion

When I ask people what good writing should do, they usual-
ly say it should “flow.” When I ask them what flow means,
they usually have no idea how to answer.
What they’re really talking about are coherence and
cohesion.

Coherence is how all the parts of a piece of writing fit

together at the big-picture level. Does the intro match the
body? Does each paragraph seem related to the thesis?
Does the conclusion wrap everything up? And so on. This
is easier to get right than cohesion because you can look
at a paragraph and say to yourself, “Oh, I can see that this
paragraph talks about something unrelated to what I said
the paper was going to be about in the introduction. I bet-
ter change it.”
In most of my classes, I draw something that looks
like this on the board (this looks better, though, because I
asked a professional illustrator to draw it):

108

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 108 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

Notice that all of the arrows point in two directions.

All of these things should in some way point to each other.
The thesis should point toward each paragraph’s topic
sentence, which should point back to the thesis. Each
topic sentence should prepare the reader for the rest of
the paragraph; each sentence in a body paragraph should
point back to its topic sentence. The conclusion should
point back to the body and the thesis. And so on.

109

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 109 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Cohesion is how well the parts hang together at the sen-

tence and word level. This is probably what most people
think of as flow.
There are two main ways to create cohesion.
The first way is to use a lot of words that refer to other
words in your text and be clear about what they refer to.
This way of flowing has to do with the meanings of words.
Pronouns like it, that, and this will point your reader to
other things in your text and make the flow stronger – if
you’re clear about what “this” and “that” are. (Usually,
the closest noun or phrase that comes before one of these
words is what it refers to.) You can also use synonyms to do
this. (Like, if your paper is about academic dishonesty, you
can use words like academic misconduct, cheating, aca-
demic integrity, and so on throughout the paper.)
The second way is to use more traditional conjunction
or “connector” words and phrases. This might be what you
think of as “transition” words. This way of flowing has to
do with words that are more about the structure of sen-
tences. You should learn a lot of these and learn the dif-
ferences between them. They include conjunction words
like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so and phrases like further-
more, nevertheless, anyway, instead, besides, as a result
of, instead of, in addition to, therefore, on the contrary, as
a result, in addition, because of, and so on. There are a lot.
Getting to know them and using a wide variety of them is
important.

110

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 110 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

Another Note on Transitions

You can use obvious “transition words” at the beginning
of paragraphs, and those will work OK. The really, really
obvious ones sometimes feel tired and overused, though.
I don’t usually recommend starting each paragraph with
“firstly,” “secondly,” “thirdly” and so on, and I don’t usual-
ly think a conclusion should start with “In conclusion.” It’s
not wrong to do this, but I always encourage people to use
the actual content of what they’re writing about to make
transitions rather than relying on these types of words.
Let me give a quick example from one of the papers I
quoted in the “Conclusions” section. It’s the final sentence
of one paragraph and the beginning of the next one:

Maley (1983) comments on other dificulties, like

unrealistic expectations of both foreign teachers
and their employers, isolation of foreign teachers,
and lack of detailed information about foreign teach-
ers’ objectives.
The number of foreign English teachers in China
continues to grow, yet the dificulties that Maley first
noticed in the early eighties continue to be common
for foreign teachers in China today.

Note that the paragraph doesn’t start with an obvious

transition word, but does repeat a number of words from
the previous sentence – foreign teachers, dificulties, and

111

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 111 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Maley (the scholar I quote in the previous paragraph). It

also makes a shif in the time frame discussed – the first
paragraph quotes a paper from 1983, and the new para-
graph mentions that year, as well as things happening
“today” – that is, now, when I was writing the paper. With
little things like this, you can usually avoid overly relying
on those classic (overused) transition words.

TL;DR: Flow means coherence and cohesion, which

are largely done by using words that point to other
words in your text.

112

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 112 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Making Changes

The only way I can get anything written at all is to write

really, really shitty first draf ts.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Rewriting and Editing

You should always assume that the first draf you pound
out is going to be, more or less, garbage.
Sorry. It’s this way for everyone, even really good
writers.
I heard once that the word draf ofen has diferent a
meaning for students than professors:

• Student: A draf is not quite finished – maybe missing

a body paragraph and a conclusion, no references, no
in-text citations, some parts are just notes jotted down
to yourself, some parts are cut-and-pasted excerpts
from articles you read that you plan to paraphrase
later. You’re hoping to get some feedback about what
to write next or just buy some time until you sit down
to really finish.

113

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 113 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

• Prof: A draf is a complete, turned-in paper with ref-

erences and citations, maybe already proofread once
or twice by the student, that will eventually be signifi-
cantly changed and rewritten, even though the student
already worked really hard on it and it looks finished.

Whatever your draf looks like, revision (also known as

rewriting) is one of the most important parts of writing The
Paper. For most writers, this is where 50 to 70 percent of
the actual stuf you see in the finished paper happens.
Hopefully, you’ll get some good feedback from your
professor or TA (or a friend or two, or someone in the writ-
ing centre, etc.), and then have enough time to put the
paper away and not think about it for a few days, and then
come back to it with fresh eyes (re-vision, literally!).
Even if your prof doesn’t ask for a draf, I highly, highly,
highly, HIGHLY recommend doing some version of what I
said in the last paragraph. You should assume you’ll make
many major changes to your paper during the revision pro-
cess. Maybe you’ll remove or rearrange whole paragraphs,
delete or add multiple sentences, rearrange huge chunks,
make the introduction the conclusion and write a new
introduction – whatever works.

Editing and Proofreading

Revising is diferent from what we call “editing” or “proof-
reading.” (These things have oficial definitions used by

114

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 114 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Writing “The Paper”

professional editors, but we’ll talk about the more general

way these words are used in academic writing.) Revising is
making radical changes to the content of the paper; it’s basic-
ally the same thing as writing – just, you know, more of it.
What many people call editing or proofreading involves
making the final finishing touches, where you make sure
everything is working right – grammar, punctuation, cit-
ations, precise and correct word choices, formatting. You
won’t catch everything when you do this, but 95 percent of
the time there will be obvious mistakes you didn’t notice at
first that you’ll catch if you go over it one last time.
Some general tips for editing:

• Have someone else do it.

• Be aware of issues that challenge you (verb tenses?

commas? subject-verb agreement?) and read the
paper through once just paying attention to those
specific issues.

• Once you’re satisfied with the coherence, try reading

backwards, sentence-by-sentence, to look for errors at
the sentence level.

TL;DR: Your paper probably will and should change a

lot from the first draf to the last. It’s best to write,
put it aside for a bit, and then come back to rewrite.
Be sure to check for errors (and/or have someone
else do it) before you turn something in.

11 5

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 115 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 FOUR

Other Stuf You

Should Know

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 117 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 Feedback

Where to Get Help

Writing shouldn’t be lonely. I understand that you ofen
need to pound out something quickly and turn it in on time
for class, but ideally, if you’re writing more than one draf
of a paper, you’ll have a chance to get more pairs of eyes
on whatever you write. Below are some common sources
of help you might choose. No matter which of these you
use, it’s important to let whoever is helping you know as
much as they can about the assignment: show them a copy
of the syllabus or the assignment rubric if your instructor
has provided them.

Peer Feedback
Many instructors use peer feedback in writing classes. It
can feel a bit weird to comment on your classmates’ drafs,
but it helps in three big ways:

• you get to see how other people are approaching the

assignment

• you get to see what “works” for you as a reader

• you get advice on how your paper looks to readers.

119

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 119 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

More people commenting on your paper = more chan-

ces to make it better. You might even consider seeking
advice from a friend or roommate who isn’t in your class.
You don’t have to follow all the advice you get from peers,
because you know best what you want your paper to do,
but you should consider it. One thing to note: writing
instructors usually discourage peer feedback on grammar
errors, especially early on, because we want you to focus
on the ideas and overall vibe of the text (and also because
not everyone gives good grammar advice, to be honest).

Writing Centre
Usually, your campus will have a place where you can go
to get help with writing. Sometimes it’s called the “writing
centre”; other times, it may be called something like the
“learning centre” or “learning commons” or some other
name. Whatever it’s called, you can expect the following:

• A one-on-one session with someone who is trained in

responding to writing. Maybe a peer (a fellow under-
graduate), or a graduate student who is studying
something related to writing, or even a professional
tutor who is more like a writing professor.

• General advice on how to improve your assignment in

a “big picture” way – things like organization, expres-
sion of main ideas, and so on.

12 0

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 120 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Other Stuff You Should Know

• Most likely, a reluctance to “fix” problems with your

paper. Generally, writing centres see their mission as
helping you to develop your own awareness and skills
so you can improve your writing on your own.

A Paid Private Tutor or Editor

You may find that a private language-focused tutor or
editor will be more willing to ofer direct feedback on
things like grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.
This can be helpful (and expensive!) but make sure you’re
not violating your university’s academic-integrity policy:
many schools will prohibit “unauthorized” editing. When
in doubt, check with your instructor. I don’t think profes-
sors should be scared of students seeking paid editorial
help – afer all, we do it too. (My writing is always much
better when I pay an editor to help me check for errors,
fix my citations, and so on before I submit something for
publication!)

Grammarly, Spellcheck in Microsof Word,

or Other Sofware
These things can be helpful, but they can also be wrong,
and can never replace a human reader. They can catch
some big obvious mistakes, but because they’re auto-
matic, they overgeneralize rules in ways that ofen do not
make sense and can easily “misinterpret” what you’re try-
ing to do in your sentences. (Really, they don’t “interpret”

12 1

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 121 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

at all, they just automatically apply rules.) A good program

like this is better than nothing, but barely.

TL;DR: It’s always best to have someone other than

yourself read something you write, and give you
suggestions on how to improve it, before you turn it
in. It’s up to you whether to follow their advice,
though. Sofware can help, but it’s not perfect.

12 2

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 122 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Vocabulary

Academic Words
I wish I could just give you a list of a thousand words and
tell you that if you memorize them all, you’ll be ready to
read and understand anything. Sadly, it doesn’t work that
way.
Even if I could give you a list, it wouldn’t be complete.
Let’s say that you know the word concept, which seems
to appear in a lot of academic texts. (It means something
like “a big, general idea.”) Even if you felt comfortable with
that word, you’d still have to make sure you know all other
forms of it, like conception, concepts, conceptual, concep-
tualization, conceptualize, conceptualized, conceptualizes,
conceptualizing, and conceptually. One word is now ten.
So instead of a list, I’ll give you a few general princi-
ples, and some suggestions on where to look.
First, there are some general “academic words” –
which really just means words that happen to appear more
in texts that are used in universities and by scholars and
researchers – that you should make sure you understand
when you’re reading. The best source I know for this is
something called the Academic Word List, which was put

12 3

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 123 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

together by Averil Coxhead from Victoria University of

Wellington, in New Zealand. She did a ton of research, look-
ing at millions and millions of words in academic texts, and
created a list of the 570 most common words in academic
English (not counting really common words that are used
outside of academia as well, like the or and or be or do).
If you know these academic words, understand them
when you read them, and use them correctly in your own
writing, it will help a lot. I don’t have a plan for how you
should do this, but if you do an internet search for “aca-
demic word list,” you’ll get a lot of information and web-
sites that have this list and ways to study it.
Second, depending on what you’re studying, you’ll
find you have to learn a more specialized vocabulary –
sometimes you hear people use the word jargon to
describe this. For example, I studied English literature
when I was an undergraduate, so I had to know what
something called “iambic pentameter” was. (It’s a kind
of poetry that Shakespeare used. Don’t worry, you don’t
have to know it.)
On the other hand, I didn’t study economics, so while
I know that “supply and demand” is something you hear
economists talk about, I don’t exactly know its technical,
specific meaning within the field of economics. But you
should, if that’s your major.

124

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 124 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Other Stuff You Should Know

Academic Phrases
In addition to specific words, there are also a lot of phrases
that are commonly used in academic texts, and it’s helpful
to know them for both reading and your own writing.
Some researchers refer to these as “moves” that are
commonly made in academic writing. The most famous
example of this is what the researcher John Swales calls
Creating a Research Space (CARS), something that writers
of academic articles ofen do when they begin by estab-
lishing the importance of an area of research, argue that
something is missing from that area, and explain how their
own paper will fill that missing gap.
I can’t list every single possible phrase, but in the case
of CARS, here are some of the phrases writers might use:

The concepts of X and Y are central to ...

Very little is currently known about X in ...

Evidence suggests that X is among the most

important factors for ...

One of the most significant current discussions

in X is ...

I borrowed these from something called the Academic

Phrasebank, which was compiled by John Morley at the

12 5

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 125 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

University of Manchester. I highly recommend its use – it

lists hundreds and hundreds of common phrases, taken
from real academic papers, organized by their purpose.
Morley doesn’t consider reusing the Academic Phrasebank
phrases to be plagiarism, for the most part, and I think he’s
right. You can search for it online and even buy an entire
PDF file of the phrasebook for under ten dollars.

TL;DR: There are a lot of words and phrases that are

more commonly used in academic writing than in
other kinds of communication. The best way to learn
them is to read a lot, and there are resources like the
Academic World List and the Academic Phrasebank
that can help.

126

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 126 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Grammar

Grammar is the most important part of writing and lan-

guage, but we can’t really address it separately from any
other part of language, because it’s baked in. Everything
is grammar. Diane Larsen-Freeman, a scholar who is prob-
ably one of the world’s leading experts on teaching gram-
mar, doesn’t even call it “grammar”; she calls it “grammar-
ing,” to show that it’s an active part of using language.
Most grammar resources are lists of things you
shouldn’t do. Personally, I have little to say about how to
avoid grammar errors, because diferent people struggle
with diferent things, and a lot of grammar advice is sub-
jective. Rather than trying to “learn grammar,” you’ll do
better if you practise writing, get feedback on where you
might be making grammatical mistakes, and then learn
more about how to fix those mistakes.
There are a few grammar things that I think you need to
know, but keep in mind that everyone has diferent needs.
Below, I have two pieces of advice based on issues I see in
a lot of my own students’ writing. It’s totally subjective, but
I believe strongly that I’m right and that everyone else’s
grammar advice is just folk tales and superstition. Here it is:

12 7

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 127 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

1 Ninety-five percent (or more) of the time you can’t

join independent clauses (basically sentences, things
that have a noun and a verb that work together) with
commas in English. You can do it in some other lan-
guages, but not this one. In formal written English, you
have to use a conjunction, a semicolon, or a period.

NO It was snowing, we went outside.

OK It was snowing, and we went outside
OK It was snowing; we went outside.
OK It was snowing. We went outside.
OK It was snowing, so we went outside
OK It was snowing, but we went outside.

2 On a related note, you’ve got to be careful about where

the punctuation goes when you use the word however,
because if you’re not, you might end up trying to join
independent clauses with a comma again, which, like I
said, you can’t do in English.

NO It was snowing, however, we went outside.

NO It was snowing, however; we went outside.*
NO It was snowing however, we went outside.

*  Technically,   this   one   could   be   OK   if   you   had   some   stuff   in   the 

sentences   before   and   after   it   that   made   the   however function 
differently,   like   “It   was   very   cold   that   day,   and   we   had   been 
planning   to   spend   the   day   indoors.   It   was   snowing,   however;   we 
went   outside.   No   kid   can   resist   the   chance   to   play   in   the   snow.” 

12 8

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 128 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Other Stuff You Should Know

NO It was snowing however; we went outside.

OK It was snowing; however, we went outside.
OK It was snowing. However, we went outside.

That’s it. Those are two things I think a lot of people get
wrong and that you should pay attention to.
For everything else, I recommend that you:

• use a writing centre’s website (e.g., Purdue University’s

Online Writing Lab)

• get a grammar textbook (see the “Further Reading”

section)

• take a grammar class.

If you’re really serious about understanding how gram-

mar works, take a grammar or linguistics class in your uni-
versity’s English or Linguistics department. This might
sound boring, but you’ll learn a ton, especially if you grew
up speaking English and never had to think about English
grammar because it was already just in your head. I took
grammar classes twice when I was a student, and I’d do it
again if I had time.

TL;DR: Grammar can’t be separated from any other

part of language. Lots of people use commas wrong,
so learn the right way. Get a grammar reference book
or take a grammar class if you can.

12 9

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 129 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Sentences

Sentences are important, obviously. They don’t have to be

complicated. They should be clear and concise and rela-
tively simple and not all that long.
The most important thing to know about them is that
you should use a variety of types of sentences. To demon-
strate this, I’m going to write three paragraphs below, each
of which ofers advice about sentences. See if you can fig-
ure out which one sounds the best.

Short sentences. It’s OK to write short sentences. These

are called “simple sentences.” They’re ofen short. They’re
pretty much just a subject and a verb. Sometimes they
include other things. Another short kind of sentence is a
“compound sentence.” Those have a conjunction (like and)
in them. You can write simple sentences and compound
sentences, and they will both feel pretty simple.

Long sentences. Of course, if you use nothing but simple or

compound sentences, your writing can begin to seem overly
simplistic and dull, in which case you may want to consider
the benefits of using more complicated types of sentences

13 0

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 130 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Sentences

known as “complex sentences.” These are sentences that

have independent clauses (which usually just have subjects
and verbs) but also have dependent clauses that can (for
example) start with words like “which” or “that.”
There are even “compound-complex sentences,” which
start stacking up all kinds of clauses in ways that can be
somewhat tricky to follow, but which, if written well, can
allow you to explore a number of diferent connected ideas
while not losing your sense of “flow,” though they can also
start to feel unnecessarily long and complicated, especial-
ly if they happen again and again and again in a row.

Varied sentences. The point is: vary your sentence pat-

terns. Simple sentences are too simple, and if you use a lot of
them, your writing can seem brusque and choppy, as in para-
graph no. 1 above. Compound-complex sentences, though
useful when needed, can become needlessly long. You can
end up confusing readers if you use them all the time, as in
paragraph no. 2. Ideally, you’ll use all diferent types of sen-
tences. The first paragraph in this sequence felt too simple.
The second one felt too complicated. This one is (I think) just
right, and it’s because of the variation in sentence patterns,
which somehow feels more natural and readable.

TL;DR: Use a variety of long (compound, complex,

compound-complex) and short (simple) sentences
throughout your paper.

13 1

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 131 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

This page intentionally left blank
 Further Reading

Recommended Books on Academic Writing

There have been hundreds of writing textbooks written,
but check these out. Any one of these books would be a
helpful to read in addition to TL;DR, if your reaction to this
book was TS;WM* and you want to go deeper.

Academic Writing: An Introduction, by Janet Giltrow, Richard

Gooding, and Daniel Burgoyne
This has been the gold standard of Canadian writing text-
books for some years for a reason. It does what TL;DR aims
to do – that is, it’s practical while still putting things in the
larger social context academic writing happens in – but in
a more eloquent and in-depth way.

Advance in Academic Writing: Integrating Research, Critical

Thinking, Academic Reading and Writing, by Steve Marshall
This book combines some practical concerns about gram-
mar and sentences with larger-scale stuf about how to
write various versions of The Paper. The class on writing
that I teach is based on this book.

*  Too   short;   want   more. 

13 3

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 133 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Mastering Academic Writing, by Boba Samuels and Jordana

Garbati
I really appreciate the way this book takes students’
experiences seriously and uses examples from students’
perspectives. I think you’ll find it very practical.

They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing,

by Gerald Graf and Cathy Birkenstein
This short book is one of my favourites – it’s clear and pre-
cise and gives you practical tips, including templates for
how to write about arguments.

Writing from Sources, by Brenda Spatt

Most writing textbooks don’t make the fact that you’ll be
mostly reading, summarizing, and interpreting other texts
a focus, but this one does. It’s quite long, so it’s the oppos-
ite of TL;DR, but it’s comprehensive and extremely useful. I
highly recommend it.

Recommended Reference Books

A Student’s Grammar of the English Language, by Sidney
Greenbaum and Randolph Quirk
This book is out of print, but you can usually find it used on
the internet for a good price. It’s extremely detailed and
can answer almost any grammar problem you might be
facing, if you know where to look for it in the book.

13 4

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 134 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Further Reading

Understanding English Grammar, by Martha J. Kolln, Loretta

S. Gray, and Joseph Salvatore
This has been in use for a long time (I used the sixth edition
in college twenty years ago). A helpful, readable, and prac-
tical grammar guide.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological

Association
MLA Handbook
The Chicago Manual of Style
Make sure you get the most up-to-date versions – these
change every few years.

Well-Known Books about Language and Writing

You Might Not Want to Read
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
Strunk and White are dead, so they can’t argue with me,
but there’s no reason for this book to be as widely assigned
in colleges and universities as it is. It’s a collection of opin-
ions about how language should be used, and it’s interest-
ing and useful as that, but it’s not a manual for academic
writing.

Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, edited by

Jeremy Butterfield
Books like this are fun, but again, they have almost no rela-
tionship to the endeavour of writing well in the average

13 5

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 135 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

university course. (And again, Fowler died in 1933, which

doesn’t mean the book is bad, but I’m just saying.)

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and

Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers,
by Kate L. Turabian
The author of this book is also not alive, so I may just be a
coward. This book is actually really good, but only if you’re
certain you need to learn Chicago style, and not the more
common MLA or APA styles.

13 6

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 136 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Instructor Appendix
Activities for the Classroom

Below is a list of activities connected to several of the sec-

tions in each of the three main chapters of TL;DR. Some
are adapted from assignments I learned about from my
colleagues who teach in the Foundations of Academic
Literacy program at Simon Fraser University; others are
my own invention. You’re welcome to use or adapt any that
look like they might work for your classroom.

Chapter 1: Stuf You Should Know before You Start

Judging Sentences
The first activity I usually do in my writing class is hand out
a sheet with seven or eight sentences on it, drawn from a
variety of text types – nonfiction essays, novels, academ-
ic articles, business writing, scripture, whatever. I regu-
larly update it with sentences that draw my attention. I
don’t teach a particular lesson on sentence construction
along with it, although you easily could. Instead, I use it
as a springboard to ask students questions like those list-
ed below, which I think gets us all warmed up for more of

13 7

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 137 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

a metalinguistic or metadiscursive conversation. I’d rath-

er the students start by explaining and maybe interrogat-
ing some of their own notions of what’s good or bad about
writing, because I hope they’ll broaden their understand-
ing of what that might mean throughout the course.

• Which of these sentences do you like or dislike? Why?

• Can you easily identify who or what is doing something

in this sentence? (Why or why not?)

• What makes a good sentence?

• What makes writing good?

Identifying Audience, Genre, and Purpose

Another activity I use toward the beginning of my course
is giving students four short excerpts of text with no iden-
tifying information. Ofen, I use a Wikipedia article, a film
or music review, an email, and the introduction to an aca-
demic article. I have the students read the whole thing,
and then I assign groups to focus on one of the texts and
try to answer these questions:

• Who do you think the intended audience of this text is?

• What do you think the author’s purpose or hoped-for

outcome of the text is?

• What kind of text is this? If you had to give it a name,

what would it be?

13 8

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 138 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Instructor Appendix

Sometimes they get it right away, sometimes they don’t. I

find that it helps here to really push each group to explain
why they answered the way they did, using specific exam-
ples from the text. This is a good way to get people think-
ing about genre and genre features.

Musical Genre Features

Another genre-related warm-up activity I do is create a
streaming audio playlist with a variety of songs from dis-
parate genres. My current genre playlist is

• “Master of Puppets,” by Metallica

• “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” by SNAP!

• Beethoven’s 5th Symphony

• “Can I Kick It?,” by a Tribe Called Quest

• “40 Rods to the Hog’s Head,” by Tera Melos

This seems to be a good mix of familiar and unfamiliar songs

for the students; even the songs they don’t know have
obvious genre features. What I like about this activity is that
it’s easy for some students to say things like “heavy metal,”
“dance,” “classical,” and “hip-hop,” but everyone has to
think a bit more when asked why we know how to label
those songs with those genres. I try to explain that their
familiarity with genre features has to do with their exposure
to this music in its social context, and that they probably

139

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 139 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

learned this from texts, media, friends and family members,

or other symbolically mediated contact with the world.
We then talk about how this might map on to learning
about genres of writing within academic contexts. It’s also
fun to find out how out of touch I am with contemporary
music, though I try to blow their minds with that last song,
which is “math rock,” a genre that, according to Wikipedia,
“is characterized by complex, atypical rhythmic structures
(including irregular stopping and starting), counterpoint,
odd time signatures, angular melodies, and extended,
ofen dissonant, chords.”

Analyzing “Content Course” Assignments

Depending on when students are taking your writing course,
I’ve found a useful activity is bringing in an actual descrip-
tion of an assignment from another course and attempt-
ing to analyze “what the professor is looking for” – looking
for words or phrases that might be unfamiliar to beginning
university students and trying to “translate” them into con-
cepts you might be using in a first-year writing class.

Chapter 2: Reading and Writing about Other Texts

Prereading and Reverse Outlining
Early in the course, I like to walk my students through a
prereading or “reading around the text” activity by hand-
ing out a paper copy of an academic article. (I like to use the
journal English Today, published by Cambridge, because it

14 0

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 140 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Instructor Appendix

tends to run short articles with clearly demarcated head-

ings, and I’m somewhat familiar with the subject matter,
which is the English language as it is used, taught, and
learned around the world. On a related note, I’m a fan of
the “Writing about Writing” approach and feel that I can
ofer more to students if the things we discuss in the class-
room are rooted in a discipline I know well.) I find the phys-
icality of the thing helps everyone focus.
I send them on a kind of scavenger hunt to find the title
of the article, the title of the journal, the publication date,
the abstract, the reference list, and any other useful and
common discrete parts of an article that may be present. I
quickly define or ask the students to define each of these
things as relevant.
Next, I break the article into sections and ask the stu-
dents, in groups, to write reverse outlines of paragraphs in
their assigned sections, using less than a sentence for each
paragraph or group of paragraphs. Either verbally or on a
whiteboard or a Google doc, we compile all the snippets of
summaries into one big reverse outline of the whole text.
This works well to help students see how these reading
strategies can be used to break down the meaning of a text
that might seem intimidating at first.

The Unreasonably Short Summary

I’m sure everyone assigns some version of a summary.
One thing I like to do is start with unreasonably short

14 1

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 141 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

summaries. Sometimes I’ll show a one- or two-minute

YouTube video – maybe a commercial or a political adver-
tisement – and ask groups to answer the question, “What
was that video about?” in a single sentence. We then dis-
cuss what some groups chose to include in their sentence
and others didn’t, and why. This is a chance to talk about
some amorphous concepts like the “main point” of a text,
and whether and how objectivity is possible in summaries.
Another short-summary activity I borrowed from my
colleague Steve Marshall is the one-hundred-word sum-
mary. One hundred words is a lot less than it sounds, and
asking students to summarize even something as short as a
1,000 to 1,500-word magazine article in one hundred words
is a nearly impossible task, but I tell them to expect to be
frustrated by this and to stick to the limit anyway. I have
students read each other’s short summaries in pairs or
groups and look for two things in their partner’s summary:

• any language reuse, no matter how long or short the

passage reused (everything from single words to whole
sentences)

• what things their partner included that they lef out,

and vice versa.

Both lead to fruitful discussions, whether on the nature

of paraphrasing, quotation, and plagiarism, in the first
case, or how we determine what is truly essential

14 2

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 142 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Instructor Appendix

information and what is an “unnecessary detail” in a sum-

mary. (I later let them write longer summaries, don’t worry.).

Believing and Doubting

This comes from Peter Elbow’s classic Writing without
Teachers. It’s a simple exercise, but I find it a necessary
counterbalance to the “critical = negative” mindset many
students seem to have. There are a few ways to do what
Elbow calls “playing the believing game” and “playing the
doubting game,” but I have two questions for students to
ask about texts:

• What if everything in this text were true?

• What if everything in this text were false?

Sometimes I give them a short text about something

ambiguous – for a few years, I used an article about the sci-
entific study of near-death experiences, which was inter-
esting because it touched on both highly subjective, nearly
mystical qualitative accounts, of which many people are
naturally skeptical, and the rigorous social science meth-
ods used for doing the actual research. I found students
had to stretch a bit either way; I’d ask them to write a two-
hundred-word response from the “believing” position or
the “doubting” position. This gave them a chance to put
some of the language of what I’ve called “stance” into
practice, regardless of what they might actually believe.

14 3

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 143 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Who Says What

This activity is meant to draw attention to attribution and
can be done in a variety of ways. The simplest is to ask
students to identify everything in a short academic arti-
cle that is attributed to anyone but the original author of
the text. This can be harder to do than it sounds: they may
need to look closely at things that are not in direct quotes
but are nonetheless attributed to another “voice.” (This
includes vague phrases like “some may argue ...”)
I like to do an expanded version of this activity on a col-
laborative platform like Google Docs, in which the assign-
ment is to identify every person or entity in a short article:
any author cited, any text quoted or referred to, any organ-
ization or institution mentioned. The students can then
make a list of these things and find relevant weblinks to
them (e.g., a scholar’s university website profile, a DOI for
a journal article, or an organization’s homepage). This sets
up a future assignment about searching for sources, which
I’ll mention in the next chapter.

The Academic Integrity Spectrum

This is another activity I adapted from one of Steve
Marshall’s textbooks. I draw a line on the board and label
one end “Totally OK” and the other “Punishable by death
or expulsion.” (I take some inspiration from my colleague
Sean Zwagerman, who once referred to punishments of
plagiarism as “the academic death penalty.”)

14 4

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 144 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Instructor Appendix

I then provide a list of scenarios involving students

getting “help” with writing assignments. My SFU colleague
Andrew Flostrand’s article “Undergraduate Student
Perceptions of Academic Misconduct in the Business
Classroom” includes a handy list of sixteen diferent
scenarios, but you can create others based on your own
experience.
In groups, students place each scenario somewhere
along the continuum and then explain why they placed
certain behaviours closer to the “good” or “bad” end of
the spectrum. This allows us to have a nuanced discussion
about plagiarism, academic-integrity policies, collabora-
tion, and things relevant to the writing classroom like peer
editing, paid proofreading, the role of tutors, and such.

Chapter 3: Writing “The Paper”

Everyone will have diferent ways of walking their students
through The Paper, but here are a few things I like to do
along the way.

Reading for Sources

This starts the same way as the “Who Says What” activity
but expands on it. I ask students the following questions
about a text, which they answer in a collaborative-text
document:

• Who are the scholars and scholarly organizations men-

tioned in the text?

14 5

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 145 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

• What other texts are mentioned in the text?

• If it’s a web text, what links are there to other texts?

• What else has the author written on this or similar

subjects?

These questions will generate a jumble of people, organ-

izations, and texts, which is usually just a disorganized list
at this point. Next, I ask them to search for one or two arti-
cles written by the scholars mentioned in the text that are
in the same general subject-matter neighbourhood.
At this point, I might ask them to start creating an APA-
style reference list of potential sources to use for a short
response or other type of paper related to whatever we’re
reading about. I might also have them generate a list of
potential keywords to use to search academic databases
for further relevant articles. The keyword list can take a
while, and I try to have the groups learn by trial and error
which words and phrases used in the original article seem
to generate useful results and which are just idiosyncratic
phrases the author happens to have used that won’t help
much when looking for additional sources.
By the end of this activity, each group has usually pro-
duced a list of five to ten solid articles that could be used
as additional sources for a paper, and I allow anybody to
use these sources if they want. (All the groups’ lists are
shared with the whole class.)

14 6

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 146 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Instructor Appendix

Bad Thesis Statements and Better Thesis Statements

This can be done as a stand-alone group activity or with
actual thesis statements students have brainstormed
for their own version of The Paper. Usually, we start with
a dull, facile, or even obviously false thesis statement.
Students then come up with two or three questions about
the statement and then two or three counterarguments
(this can also be done by trading statements in pairs or
between two groups). The final product is meant to be a
statement that has been inoculated by their own counter-
arguments, or has become more sophisticated by antici-
pating possible questions readers might have about the
position being taken in the statement. The activity might
look something like this:

Original statement: Airplanes are dangerous.

Questions: How dangerous are airplanes? What

about cars, boats, etc.? Can anything be done to
mitigate the dangers that do exist in air travel?

Counterarguments: There are many more auto acci-

dents and deaths every year than airplane accidents
and deaths. Airplanes are safer than they used to be.
Crashes seem to rarely occur in some regions but
more often in others.

14 7

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 147 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

Better statement: Despite the strides that have been

made in air travel safety in the last century, certain
steps need to be taken to lessen the risk of plane
crashes in developing regions.

The above example is certainly overly simplistic, and I

probably wouldn’t have my students write about airplane
safety, but I find this exercise does help students think
about how to make their thesis statements more nuanced.

Revision Plans
I sometimes ask students to write something called a
“revision plan,” which I first learned of from the website of
the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing.
My version includes just two parts, written in an informal
list of bullet points:

• Briefly summarize the feedback you got from peers

and the instructor along with any additional insights
you have afer rereading your draf.

• Write a plan that touches on specific areas you plan to

change, how, and why, for your final draf.

My hope is that students’ getting their thoughts togeth-

er all in one place like this before they do a big rewrite will
be helpful, but the key is to make it short and simple so it
doesn’t feel like extra busywork.

14 8

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 148 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 Acknowledgments

All of these people have taught me about writing at various

points in the last twenty-five years; some in conversation,
some in collaboration, some who edited or responded to
my own writing, some without me having met them other
than through their own writing:
Jane Thurlow, Mike Carrol, Christian Birrer, Brian
Meier, TerryKay Birrer (lux perpetua luceat ei), Daniel
Boatsman, Chris Chaney, Luke Reinsma, Tom Tryzna, Terry
Santos, Suzanne Scott, Kathleen Doty, Nikola Hobbel,
Corey Lewis, David Stacey, Andrew Shutes-David, Ling Shi,
Ryuko Kubota, Patricia Duf, Anthony Paré, Sandra Zappa-
Hollman, Steven Talmy, Steve Marshall, Susan Barber,
Jan Maclean, Daniel Dunford, Ena Lee, Taylor Morphett,
Janet Giltrow, Amanda Wallace, Kiyu Itoi, Greg Harder,
Melek Ortabasi, Katja Thieme, Walter Ong, Kenneth Burke,
Suresh Canagarajah, Paul Kei Matsuda, Peter Elbow,
Charles Bazerman, Xiaoye You, John Edwards, Sibo Chen,
Ian Kent, Saeed Nazari, Jiang Dong, Ismaeil Fazel, Tomoyo
Okuda, Bong-gi Sohn, Rae Lin, Nasrin Kowkabi, Junghyun
Hwag, Tim Anderson, Ching-Chiu Lin, Betsy Gilliland.

14 9

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 149 2023-06-01 3:41 PM

 T L ;DR

The “Flow” section uses material from the linguistics

website Glottopedia under a Creative Commons licence.
Many thanks to Nina Conrad, Jennifer Walsh Marr, Julie
Moore, Nadine Pedersen, Katrina Petrik, Lesley Erickson,
and two anonymous readers for their feedback on this
manuscript.
An enormous amount of gratitude to Sarah Heng
Hartse for the hand-drawn diagrams (and for immeasur-
ably more).
I’m grateful to the Collegeville Institute and the Lily
Endowment for the time and space they provided for me
to finish this book in the summer of 2022.
This book was written in many places in 2021 and 2022:
on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast
Salish peoples; on the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī, which has been
home to Kānaka Maoli, the native people of Hawai‘i, for
many years; and on land that has been stewarded by the
Ho-Chunk, Dakota, Ojibwe, and Anishinaabe peoples for
generations.

1 50

HengHartse_TLDR-interior.indd 150 2023-06-01 3:41 PM