Hi. Welcome to the Beginner’s Guide to Academic Writing for university. My name is Steve Thomas. And I teach EAP, English for Academic Purposes, here at the University of Reading.

This course is all about writing. We know there are lots of people like you from countries all around the world who would like to take a degree in English. But you’re worried that your English isn’t good enough. Well, this is a beginner’s guide. So your writing skills only need to be good enough for a pre-university course. That’s about IELTS 4.5. But even if your writing skills are stronger than this, we still think this would be a useful course for you. Together with my colleagues Anne Vicary and Sebastian Watkins, we’ll be showing you the very first piece of writing that a student did on our course a few years ago.

The student’s name is Xiao And he’s currently take a PhD at the University of California in Los Angeles in the United States. If you follow this course closely, we think you’ll be able to make the same kind improvements that Xiao has. It won’t make you an expert writer, but what it will do is give you a solid base for you to build on in the future.

So come and join us at the University of Reading and improve your academic writing skills.