D4909 – Introduction to Academic Writing in Sports Science

                                      Seminar 3 – Extra Tasks


Homework
Tasks

1. Reading and corrections: Read the below article.

* Try and improve the article below to make it more appropriate for academic writing:


Alzheimer’s Disease

Although it causes big problems to do with public health, only five medical treatments are allowed
to be used for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and these help to control symptoms rather than change how
the disease progresses. Studies of potential drug therapy have been done in patients with disease
that is already showing symptoms, yet evidence suggests that the changes in the pathology
associated with AD begin a few years before this. Maybe drug therapy can help in this pre-clinical
stage before the neurodegenerative process is established.

Techniques that allow the condition to be diagnosed much earlier, such as cerebrospinal fluid
biomarkers and neuroimaging, are really important to test out this theory in clinical trials. Some
results from the recent times for the trials of specific agents look really positive but definitely
people should think carefully about these results. Such medicines could maybe stop dementia coming
on earlier and would therefore reduce how common it is by a lot.


Original text:  (Adapted from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5922703/)


2. Discuss the questions below regarding academic style:

- Writing from the 1^st person (I think, we found….) is more effective than the third person (It
was found, it can be argued…):

- Academic tone may be informal and can use contractions (can’t, don’t etc):

- Writing in a personal style (eg using I, me, we, our..) may convey passion for a topic, which is
more important than research evidence:

- Longer sentences are more effective as more ideas can be linked together to help the flow of an
academic text:

- Avoiding tentative language (eg this could suggest…, we propose that…) shows lack of strength of
opinion and weakens the argument in academic writing:

- Longer sentences may be used in academic writing if the appropriate use of punctuation and
linking words is present: