I’ve been teaching public speaking lessons at a local graduate school (for political science/law PhD students) and recently received a request to start designing a class to help with advanced academic writing. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to find textbooks. I haven’t been impressed by what we have in our library and the lack of previews available on Amazon is making me hesitate to drop money just to check them out. Does anyone here have any suggestions? They don’t need to contain Japanese explanations.
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Is it possible to give a level range? (either using CEFR or TOEFL/TOEIC)
What kind of advanced writing is expected? 5-paragraph? Thesis? APA?
Doesn’t your school get catalogs from different sources for textbooks? I find looking through those beats… Amazon. You can also usually order a sample copy to see what the entire text contains.
Unless you’re going to be starting the course in April, a few weeks from now, you can request inspection copies from most of the publishers (or at least those I’ve dealt with).
The higher levels of the *Longman Academic Writing* series or the Oxford *Inside Writing* series have good material on the different kinds of nominalizations used in academic or formal writing and might be useful if you can expect some students to be unfamiliar with the rhetorical uses of different sentence and paragraph forms in English.
If, however, you can expect students to have mastered English and be able to write as well as a typical British university graduate, texts written for people who have been educated in English but are being initiated into the areas in question might be in order: one example—I cannot vouch for its worth, not having read it—is Bennardo’s *Thinking and Writing About Law*, (which has the advantage of being available as a native ebook).
When teaching graduate writing, I’ve found critiquing actual papers or briefs or whatever they’ll be expected to write productive: if you’re not familiar with the content areas, you might ask specialist instructors to recommend particularly good or (what might be harder) poor papers.
I teach academic writing to less advanced students than you, so my texts would not be appropriate, but as a resource, I have found the Purdue Online Writing Lab to be very worthwhile.
I’ve never liked the traditional academic writing texts. I do like Basic Steps to Writing Research Papers by Kluge and Tayor. It starts at the beginning with topic selection and works step by step through a persuasive APA essay and then an experimental APA essay.
You may need to go to a really good library.
Not a textbook per se, but there are some useful online resources that are freely available.
UNC’s Writing Center has a ton of resources: [https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/](https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/)
University of Adelaide’s does too: [https://www.adelaide.edu.au/writingcentre/resources](https://www.adelaide.edu.au/writingcentre/resources)
Also, in Japan Meidai has a grad program in law in English which has its own writing guide specifically made for students writing LLM/LLD thesis in English. Some of it is specifically tailored for their program’s thesis requirements, but a lot of it is of general use: [https://www.law.nagoya-u.ac.jp/_userdata/writing-guide.pdf](https://www.law.nagoya-u.ac.jp/_userdata/writing-guide.pdf)
There’s a book by Petchko based on teaching exactly that kind of course to non-native speakers of English in a Japanese university.