Learning the Language: Why Dolores’ Essay Isn’t Academic English…

The example of ESL writing in this article is similar to what I see in many writing samples in my own classes. Teaching basic organization is easy, but teaching writers to adequately support their ideas is much more difficult.

Though there is no easy advice that I can give, one suggestion is to never make a statement that isn’t supported further with either a citation, research, examples, observations, stories, or other ways that support the original idea. Too often, writers follow the organizational format and support the topic sentence, but fail to support the supporting sentences. This can be much more difficult. Supporting statements can stand on their own at times, but more often they require a little bit of their own support 🙂