Academic Writing

Part 2:
Elements of Writing

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2.12: Singular or Plural?
137
(d) It is often claimed that travel broadens/travels broaden the mind.
(e) Paper was/papers were very expensive in the twelfth century.
(f) How much advice/many advices were they given before coming to Australia?
(g) She had little interest/few interests outside her work.
(h) The insurance policy excludes the effects of civil war/wars.
(i)
Irons were/iron was first powered by electricity in the twentieth century.
(j)
They studied the work/works of three groups of employees over two years.
5 Practice B
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Read the text and choose the correct alternative.
A high percentage of company/companies has/have developed website/websites in
the last few years. Trading using the Internet is called e-commerce/e-commerces,
and this/these is/are divided into two main kinds: B2B and B2C. The former
involves trading between business/businesses, but many company/companies want
to use the Internet to sell directly to its/their customers (B2C). However, large
numbers have experienced trouble/troubles with security/securities and other
practical issues. In addition, the high start-up costs and the expense/expenses of
advertising means/mean that this/these company/companies often struggle to
make a profit.

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1 Components of academic style
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Study this paragraph and underline any examples of poor style.
How to make people work harder is a topic that lots of people have written
about in the last few years. There are lots of different theories etc and I think
some of them are ok. When we think about this we should remember the old
Chinese proverb, that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
So how do we increase production? It’s quite a complex subject but I’ll just talk
about a couple of ideas.
Some of the problems with the style of this paragraph can be analysed as follows: