Writing

You should also consider pages under Vocabulary and Grammar.

Websites that have a range of writing activities and guides
http://www2.elc.polyu.edu.hk/CILL/writing.htm

Writing practice without a teacher
https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/skills/writing

Cohesion and Coherence
Good academic writing should flow and link messages so that, for example, the connection between two ideas is clear and explicit. In creative writing it may be fine for to leave the reader guess how ideas are connected.

In this link you can find a useful slideshow explaining how paragraphing and coherence work together, covering quality aspects such as topic sentences.

Queen Mary, University of London provide instruction and exercises on coherence and cohesion and is an ideal way to consolidate your knowledge. They also provide detail on the '6' ways that cohesion is managed. For a more detailed exposition, University of Wollongong, Australia

Cohesive devices
http://www2.elc.polyu.edu.hk/CILL/icosa/vocabulary/transitions-contrasting/cohesive-devices/index.html

Paragraphing
University of Leicester provide a basic overview of what a paragraph in a typical essay should look like.

Sheffield University provide a nice link between paragraphing, cohesion and coherence looking at unity and flow of ideas, for example.

Academic style language
Academic writing e.g. in text books and articles is typified by certain choices of writers compared to writers in other genres such as magazines, newspapers, commercial websites etc. See more on this below.

The Manchester Phrasebank contains many functional phrases (academic functions include introducing ideas, classifying etc) that will give you an example of what academic grammar and vocabulary choices look like.

University of Bristol provides a guide to writing numbers in your assignments.

What is academic writing?
Academic writing can be distinguished from literature or writing for people's pleasure/entertainment, from letters/emails, and even from newspapers in one important category: reliability. Academic must build on well-respected sources of information by citing those sources to make it more trustworthy in the points it is making.

A good overview of reliability and 9 other categories of academic quality can be found here http://www.uefap.net/writing/writing-features/writing-features-introduction

Academic Writing is usually distinguished from General English writing because many of the vocabulary and grammar choices are different from those you would use when communicating in less formal situations. You can find an explanation of some of the features here https://www.monash.edu/rlo/research-writing-assignments/writing/features-of-academic-writing and a summary of the features with some text examples here https://aso-resources.une.edu.au/academic-writing-course/academic-writing-style/

Academic Writing Processes
Here you will find an overview of the different stages involved in writing an academic text: https://latrobe.libguides.com/writing/writing-at-university

In addition, this interactive guide from Open University provides more explanation of the different stages/steps involved in producing an essay.

Using sources in your writing
An essential features of academic writing is that it relies on credible sources for context, support, evidence etc. Academic writers need to: 1. Find sources to read 2. locate information that is relevant and important for their own writing 3. integrate the information appropriately 4. cite the source. You will find here from LLAS some activities covering all of these elements.

Finding sources
You can find here through York University a handy overview of the types of sources you can consider for your academic writing.

Finding the best sources for your writing will fall into the usual challenge of recall and precision i.e. finding enough sources and searching widely enough, but also being relevant (see below). Google scholar is a popular place to go, but for recall to be effective you cannot search only there since many resources for academic texts are not covered by Google scholar. Specialist databases that university libraries have subscriptions to must also be searched. Your institution's library is an important early place to look, whether searching by the name of the article or the name of the journal in order to then find the correct databse to find an article.

Locating relevant useful information
It is much easier to find relevant information when you are studying on a taught course because there will likely be a reading list. However, when you have to create your own research topic e.g. for a dissertation or where there is a wide remit for the topic focus, you might find this guide from Teeside University helpful, taking you through some tasks to help you focus.

Integrating information
Those who set academic writing tasks usually expect you to use your own words when using the ideas of others, although when you do use the original writer's words, it is important to show this through quotation marks and a page number reference. When using your own words, some students can fall into plagiarism by accident. The University of New South Wales has a nice simple overview and explanation of the various types of plagiarism. More specifically related to use of sources and plagiarism, you could look here at Monash information.

Integrating information you have found from your reading (or sometimes listening) involves quotation and paraphrasing. Below are some websites that help you in these skills

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=99&v=7syE6AMRA7k&feature=emb_logo

https://www.monash.edu/rlo/research-writing-assignments/writing/paraphrasing-summarising-and-quoting and here https://www.monash.edu/rlo/research-writing-assignments/referencing-and-academic-integrity/citing-and-referencing

University of New England provides exercises to practise summarising, and also of synthesising ideas from a variety of sources into a paragraph. More on synthesising here from RMIT in Australia.

Reporting structures are often very important in how well you integrate information. For example, if you write ' According to McKay (2012)' this is different from 'McKay (2012) demonstrates' or It has been shown …(McKay, 2012) and McKay (2012) claims... / It has been claimed that … (McKay, 2012). The reporting structures indicate your position or stance on that information e.g. if you support/endorse it. You can find a large list of common reporting vocabulary from University of Adelaide.

A common question that students ask is how to balance the voice of source texts with their own voice - indeed, where is the space for your own voice. This is a short text from Harvard University that discusses this point.

Citation
After using sources and citing them, you might like to try this series of activities to test your understanding http://loc.llas.ac.uk/lob/296/standalone/index.html

There are many guides to be found on the many different citation styles. Individual courses at different educational institutions may have different instructions on which style to use. You can find a handy and simple guide to some of the common citation styles at Sheffield University (APA, Harvard, OSCOLA and others).

Citation software
It is much easier these days to manage your citations by saving references to a database that integrates with your word processor and inserts citations and reference lists in the correct style. Below is a list of some of these software programs.

Endnote (may be free to use at your university although you may have to pay to install on your own computer).

Zotero (similar interface to Endnote but free)

Essays
For a very basic and general idea of an essay, start here http://www.uefap.net/writing/writing-introduction/writing-introduction-essays

Essay introductions and conclusions
University of Toronto provide a useful general overview of writing introductions and conclusions.