Difficulty In Academic Writing

Many college students face a great difficulty in writing and reading in an academic setting. However, if college students follow the right approach to this, they can overcome the problems of academic writing and reading. Stuart Greene, a composition scholar and an author of “Argument as Conversation: The Role of Inquiry in Writing a Researched Argument”, claims that academic writing and conversation share some similarities. Mike Rose, another expert in academic writing and an author of “The Politics of Remediation”, asserts that professors should develop college students’ reading and writing skills by not criticizing their mistake but welcome it. By understanding what are important approaches or strategies of studying in academic setting that

Greene believes that students should not reproduce someone’s idea when they write an argumentative essay because writing in academic setting requires students to come up with their own idea about certain topic and present it to readers in a written form. Although repeating or summarizing other people’s arguments is appropriate and necessary writing technique, the skill is insufficient when students express their opinion effectively in academic setting. According to the author, what college students ought to learn about writing is that “other people’s text can serve as tools for helping you say more about your own ideas” (34). In order to illustrate this point, Greene gives an example of Richard Rodriguez, an author of Hunger of Memory, who uses others’ writing to say more about his experience of academic as non-native speaker of English and suffering from cultural difference (33-34). Rodriguez borrows another writer, Richard Hoggart’s idea of “scholarship boy” and uses it to discover new approach to his academic hardship which suffered a cultural difference between United States and Mexico (Greene 33-34). This example shows that Rodriguez does not merely repeat another writer’s idea in his writing but approaches differently to his experience of academic through using other text. Therefore, through this example, Greene implies that students should not merely repeat another writer’s idea but utilize it to develop their own idea in writing. The author believes that as long as students only acquire summarizing skill, they cannot become an effective writer in academic