Academic Writing Resources
Many of these resources were created to support a series of workshops I conducted on Editing and Writing Skills for Research Students. The resources can be used in their own right and will be particularly useful to new research students and early career academics.
Editing and Writing Skills for Research Students
Introductory Exercises (PDF 72Kb)
Will be of particular use to research students writing in English as a second language. However, they do cover grammatical and spelling errors that are made by many native English speakers as well.
Supporting materials:
Advice to research students (PDF 122Kb)
Covers editing roles/responsibilities and common stylistic/grammatical errors. A structure for research papers for journals is presented. Many of the more complex examples used to highlight errors in style or grammar are subsequently rewritten in a concise but accurate and easily read style that I call direct writing. Some tips on how to improve your own editing and get best value from editing support provided from others e.g. Supervisors, are also provided.
Exercises and possible solutions (PDF 90Kb)
Aimed at research students and academics who have read Editing roles and responsibilities. Common stylistic and grammatical errors. Text that may be grammatically correct but is written in a quite indirect style is edited to reflect a direct writing strategy.
Editing Strategies (PDF 105Kb)
Involves a system of numbering types of writing faults within documents and drafts written by students. This can be used alone or in combination with replacement text for some or all of the stylistic errors made by the student. The aim is to allow supervisors to edit less but explain more
Supporting materials:
- Numbered Faults (PDF 88Kb)
Lists and briefly explains the numbered faults and editing symbols and provides a quick grammar lesson. - Explaining the Numbered System (PDF 215Kb)
Provides multi-layered explanations of each fault, along with corrected examples that may in turn also be written in a more direct style.
Also available as an interactive web tool.