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: […]
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 […]
Reading paper books vs ebooks
Do you feel as though you forget most of what you read online or on your Kindle or iPad? You may not be alone. A fascinating article delves into research revealing the differences between the way we process information from differing platforms – chiefly physical books vs information from screens. I certainly feel that I […]
‘Hedging’ – or being cautious in academic writing
British people certainly love their garden hedges, but what does the word ‘hedging’ mean when applied to academic writing? It bears some relationship to the idea of a hedge containing something in a soft, gentle way, unlike the sharp lines of a fence or wall. In everyday speech and writing hedging uses certain words and […]