Usefu l words in academic writing

1. Useful words in academic writing A list of words that you are likely to meet if you study at an English-speaking university

2. How well do you know a word? • Meaning/senses + forms • Collocations • Grammatical choices (colligation) • Synonyms and antonyms • Semantic preference • Semantic prosody

3. Types of words • High frequency words • 1000 word families • 2000 word families • 80% of running words in academic texts • Academic vocabulary • 570-800 word families • 8.5%-10% of running words in academic texts • Technical vocabulary • 1000 words for any subject area • 5% of running words

4. Types of words • Low frequency words • Extensive • May occur frequently within one text but not again for a long time.

5. Vocabulary learning • Spending time on the most useful words • No noticing, no learning • Practicing

6. One of the first issues we face when testing UIs is finding the right tool. UIs are designed for human interaction and as such do not lend themselves naturally to automated testing. Record and playback testing is a technique often used to test UIs. A user (usually one of the developers or testers) interacts with the software to exploit particular functionality and the sequence of interactions is recorded and can subsequently be played back automatically to repeat the test. This approach can, however, be time-consuming and prone to needing constant revision, in that as soon as a change is made to production code the test needs to be rerecorded and then re-run. These tools also require most, if not all, of the UI to be complete, and so are most useful in post-implementation testing. Another problem is that the tests are generated in a runtime environment and then stored as scripts which are not easy to read or interpret.

7. One of the first issues we face when testing UIs is finding the right tool. UIs are designed for human interaction and as such do not lend themselves naturally to automated testing. Record and playback testing is a technique often used to test UIs. A user (usually one of the developers or testers) interacts with the software to exploit particular functionality and the sequence of interactions is recorded and can subsequently be played back automatically to repeat the test. This approach can, however, be time-consuming and prone to needing constant revision, in that as soon as a change is made to production code the test needs to be rerecorded and then re-run. These tools also require most, if not all, of the UI to be complete, and so are most useful in post-implementation testing. Another problem is that the tests are generated in a runtime environment and then stored as scripts which are not easy to read or interpret.

8. Reporting verbs • Comment on someone’s work • Agree or disagree with someone else’s study • Evaluate someone’s idea

9. Shell/signaling nouns • Any abstract noun, the meaning of which can only be made specific by reference to its context • effect, result, fact, system, process, problem, approach, reason, purpose, characteristics, form issue, method, type, change, factor, feature, manner, event, stage, trend, task , category, challenge, subject, tendency, aspect, class, difficulty, phase, topic, experience , circumstance, facet, item

10. Factors In this fast-growing industry, the efficient demand management is the key factor to achieve good customer satisfaction. The demand information should be reliable as much as possible as it will determine how much supplies the company needs to buy. For this small delivery company, it is a must to well understand the customer situation and needs, balance the customer satisfaction and supply chain efficiency. The primary issue is to know how much petrol is needed to support the daily transport, how many envelopes and boxes the company needs to purchase from its suppliers and how many computer hardware and software should be ready at its start-up period. All these factors should be considered based on the customer demands. For a given problem, the best way to compute it has to be chosen. In fact, in some case the sequential algorithm is more efficient than the parallel one. It is natural to wonder why. Indeed, if we have n processors, we naturally think that the algorithm will be executed faster than with only 1 processor. But it's not necessary true. Actually, some external factors modify the thought which are the communication between the processes using a local area network (so, some physics factor could modify the data transfer time), the synchronisation between the processes etc...

11. Issue As the online transaction is rapidly increasing, e-security is becoming a severe issue. Many new users are worrying about security and privacy of sending credit card information when they shopping online. Although many customers have experienced fraud on the Internet of all kinds, the convenience and other benefits of online shopping outweigh the cost of credit card theft. If this issue is resolved, the commerce will dramatically take off in the future (John, 2000). When a business is trying to raise finance for future development and expansion, the decisions may be based on which is the 'cheapest' source of funding. Alongside the issues relating to cost, another issue that is important is the impact of the chosen financing method on the business.

12. Approach Most companies focus on "doing things right", rather than "doing the right things" (Dougherty, D., 1996, p.180). This approach affects employees stance, since they are concentrated on simply following the established processes in fear of unpredicted (or even worse, undesired) results; thus coming up with innovative ideas seems rather difficult. According to Dowlatshahi (1994, p.110), Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) is an approach to concurrent engineering which has received much attention from "those individuals who consider various implications of product design from its inception to disposal", while Wanyamaal. (2003, p.307) state that LCE focuses on designing and producing products with "minimal environmental impact during their entire life-cycle".

13. useful adjectives and adverbs • Adjectives: relating to importance, size/amount/intensity/frequency, quality, variation, etc. • Adverbs: intensifier, restrictive, hedges, additives • Common adverbs in computer science: correctly, typically, immediately, rarely, entirely, frequently, gradually, essentially, extremely, formally, regularly, significantly, statistically, previously, subsequently, approximately, randomly, specifically, imply, physically, reliably, arbitrarily, considerably, interactively, predominantly, primarily, schematically, solely, sufficiently, abstractly, appropriately, consequently, constantly, cooperatively, dynamically, fundamentally, implicitly, inherently, initially, marginally, radically, similarly, temporarily, theoretically, ultimately, uniformly

14. It seems that tag questions used in this case function in the similar way as the other Yes-No questions. (similarly) • However, as the digital information is easy to distribute over the Internet, the government and organizations should work together and protect the intellectual property in appropriate ways (Gates, 2000). (appropriately) • All the information can be mentioned and stored in the database which results an efficient way to calculate numbers by computers. (to effectively calculate)

15. Academic words in BAWE (British Academic Written English) • Academic words in Computer Science papers