Microsoft Word contains some wonderful features which can save you time and stress – and help you to create clear and academically appropriate writing. Some of its most useful tools enable you to create mulitilevel lists of headings which are stable no matter how much you ‘play about’ with your document, and can then turn […]
Which tense should I choose?
Choosing the correct tense for academic writing is not always easy. When you are writing about everyday happenings it’s generally a fairly simple task for native speakers, but not always so if English isn’t your first language. Here are some examples, with the relevant tense shown in brackets: • What I did a year ago: […]
What is ‘Harvard referencing’?
If you’ve ever struggled with Harvard referencing (and the small but annoying differences imposed by your university or department), you may have wondered what it really is and where it comes from. Next time you’re halfway through a piece of writing and wondering why you still can’t remember whether something’s italic or roman, “quoted” or […]
Advice for ESL writers from Yale University
Here is some simple but very useful advice about particular issues for ESL (English as a second language) academic writers, from the Yale University Center for Teaching and Learning. In particular I like the suggestion that starting to write early about the ‘big picture’ of your topic or research will make the whole process of […]
How to write a great research paper
If you want to raise the quality of your writing from average to excellent, you will find Professor Simon Peyton Jones – of Microsoft Research, Cambridge – the perfect guide to producing papers which will interest and engage your readers from the first sentence to the last. As a supervisor for PhD students at the […]