LETTER


 * __LETTER OF INTENTIONS__**

We are the Ocean group and our topic is "The importance of teaching Academic Debates". Our group chose this topic first because we had a experience with an Academic Debate last semester in the University and everybody in our group learned a lot from this activity. It is a very interesting subject and it is an academic practice that can help a lot any student. Furthermore, debates can improve some specific skills such as improvisation, argumentation and speech. The purpose of our essay is to defend this academic practice in Brazil as it is very uncommon in our country and it could improve many different skills of the students. Our essay was presented to the Academic Writing professor and the other students who are taking this discipline. Our intention is to call the reader's attention for this valuable practice and encourage future professors to explore this activity in their careers. The main reference we got is an article wrote by Gordon R. Mitchell: Pedagogical possibilities for argumentative agency in academic debate.

The writing process was news to everyone in the group. We never wrote an essay as a group before and it was very difficult in the beginning. We chose the topic fast because the Academic Debate practice was very fresh in our minds after the experience we had together in the semester before we write this. We had to change our approach to the theme as we started thinking of a descriptive essay but we had to change to an argumentative one as our professor asked. We have been working together since we entered in the University and this fact make our choices and decicions much easier. The idea to defend the importance of teaching Academic Debates emerged from the article we read when we was looking for another approach in our essay. Everybody enjoyed the new approach and then we divided the task for each one. The topic sentences were created together and then we divided 2 topic sentences for each member. The other tasks we divided like that: Eduardo wrote the introduction, Marcio got the conclusion, Helder made our powerpoint presentation and Gizele revised and edited the final version of our essay. The only difficult was to write the essay itself. It was an unusual experience for eveyone to write an essay by using an internet tool like wikispaces but it was very interesting. The whole process in the classes was crucial to the final result and we think that we made a good job at the end. We changed our Letter of intentions as we changed our approach to the subject and we think that it has achieved the objective.

Ariadne Gizele Eduardo Terra Helder Dias Márcio Rezende