Tertiary teaching in New Zealand/Academic skills/Academic writing/Rules of good writing

=Rules of good writing= It's all about structure! Good writing is good because the writer knows what he or she wants to say, and makes sure that everything in the paper not only relates to the topic, but is clearly connected for the reader to follow. This means that to write well, you have to state your position, reveal the information that supports your position, and demonstrate how the information fits together to make you believe that which you are trying to convince your readers of. This way, the message you are trying to send out has the best chance of being understood by the reader exactly as you intended.

Document structure
It's all about structure! You had better put a good structure in place for your written work. The structure not only needs to be present in the entire written document, but also in each part of the document. Once you know what you are going to write about (we talk about that a bit later in the module), you have to make the framework for your written work. It always involves writing an introduction that attracts the reader's attention, shows the reader what the question you are going to answer will be, and describes the pathway that the essay will take to get from the question to the answer.

Paragraph structure
Just like the essay, the paragraphs in your essay must be well structured. To do this, you have to have a good understanding of what makes a paragraph. A paragraph is how we organise sentences into groups. It is a unit of thought and not of length. Being a "unit of thought" means that it deals with only one main idea. How is a paragraph structured? Like an essay, the writer introduces it by a topic sentence, which has supporting sentences with links, and a conclusion or transition.