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Trinka IA is an online grammar checker for academic and technical writing. From advanced English grammar errors to scientific spelling, Trinka corrects it all!
Via Nik Peachey
Academic writing has a bad reputation. “When a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual,” as David Foster Wallace diagnosed the problem nearly two decades ago, “his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly).” Indeed. But the disorders behind the kind of prose that inspires provocations like Philosophy and Literature‘s “Bad Writing Contest” are, if you believe University of Chicago Writing Programs director Larry McEnerney, even more basic than that.
The theme of this week’s book collection is academic writing and to this end I curated for you this useful list. I am principally addressing research students and academics but the insights and tips from these books are also relevant to anyone keen on improving their writing style. As a research student, you get to do a lot of writing and usually across different genres, from a literature review to writing a research grant proposal. Each of these writing projects call for a specific set of skills and involve different practices and stylistics (in the popular sense of the word not the linguistic one).And because nobody of us is born a good writer, it takes so much practice to better your writing style and even much more practice when it comes to academic writing. However, what I am talking about here is guided practice, one that draws on established guidelines and norms. In other words, if you want to learn how to write better you need to learn it from people who master the craft.
November brings academic writing month #AcWriMo as researchers commit to making time to write regularly. MmIT members would like to suggest a range of digital tools and social spaces are used to encourage other writers and share good practice. Many of these have applicability beyond academic writing so we hope that you will find them useful.
Writing satisfaction is strongly linked to publishing productivity and, potentially, career success. Chris Smith reports on research investigating the tools and systems academics from all career stages use to keep writing and publishing. Age, experience, and having a sense of certainty about what sort of writing system suits you and your life are all important to productivity and overall satisfaction. Early-career researchers may struggle with external pressures and barriers such as procrastination or feeling overwhelmed which cause most dissatisfaction, but these feelings do slowly ebb away. The more experience you gain, the more likely you’ll have found a writing system that works, and the more productive, satisfied – and hopefully successful – you’ll be.
I am regularly in awe at the goodwill our students extend faculty, myself included, as they attempt to make sense of and successfully complete our idiosyncratic assignments. Too often, students hear faculty respond to any confusion students might have by telling them to “read the syllabus” or “read the assignment,” as if none of the faculty have ever tried to put together an Ikea dresser or played a board game for the first time after simply reading the instructions. Learning to do anything means learning to do the thing through some combination of instructions, participation, and materials.
The dream of all authors and editors is to be able to write and receive a steady stream of articles that are perfect to go to print just as received. The bad news is that it is just a dream. The good news is that a process called action learning can help bring the dream a little closer to reality.
What Is In This Article For You?
Whether you are reading this as an author or an editor, my guess is that one of your fonder desires would be to get journal articles published with less trouble than you currently have to endure. However, as Dr Johnson observed, what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure, so don't imagine that I am going to tell you about some magic wand, because I am not. Action learning is not a substitute for effort, but it is a way to make the effort more productive. At first, it may even take you a little longer to achieve what seems like the same result, but, in the long run, you will have every chance of turning out more papers that are closer to being "right first time".
A dissertation is an academic document that demands sufficient organisational and time management abilities to maintain a high standard overset by your respective universities. Owing to the multiple engagements that students have to juggle throughout the academic session, many of them often remain conflicted regarding how to proceed with the whole process of dissertation writing. This, in turn, affects the quality of your dissertation. To present your dissertation appropriately, you’ll be required to select a topic, and then plan and execute the whole paper on that topic, and perform adequate research and collect relevant sources and then focus on what your findings are. Now let’s delve into the process of planning and performing thorough research for your papers.
Online Study Resources
Taking notes in lectures
Learning objectives
This module will help you to:
develop strategies for taking notes in lectures. These are:
- choosing key words, phrases and concepts in lectures to be included in notes
- using basic note-taking symbols and abbreviations
- visually representing the relationship between ideas and the relative importance of information
- review your lecture notes systematically
Taking notes in lectures
Academic writing
Learning objectives
This module will help you to:
- understand some differences between spoken and written language, and the importance of these differences for academic writing
- gain insights into why academic writing is typically abstract and complex. In other words, learn about:
- the influence of Greek and Latin on academic vocabulary
- the predominance of complex noun phrases
- the concept of abstraction and how this is realised grammatically
- understand formal academic style
- learn how opinions and evaluations are expressed in academic writing
Interactive tutorial on academic integrity.
Do you need help with writing in English right now?
Are you having trouble starting an essay?
Or have you finished that essay, but are wondering if all your English writing is correct?
We’ve got all the help you need to make your English writing perfect.
It’s okay to get some help. Writing can be a challenge in any language. After all, you need to use lots of key language skills and express your creativity.
Many non-native English speakers are nervous about writing in English, because they feel like the language barrier is stopping them from being creative.
It’s not just about distributing credit where it’s due
The sociologist Robert Merton wrote perceptively about citations:
"[T]he institutionalized practice of citations and references in the sphere of learning is not a trivial matter. [Readers] located outside the domain of science and scholarship may regard the lowly footnote or the remote endnote or the bibliographic parenthesis as a dispensable nuisance .. [But] these are in truth central to the [academic] incentive system and an underlying sense of distributive justice, that do much to energize the advancement of knowledge"
Yet the significance of citations goes far beyond energizing and rewarding scientific and academic competition, and for PhDers and early career...
Twenty-five years ago, I was an early-career librarian grappling with writing about my experiences as a VSO Lecturer/Librarian in Sierra Leone. I knew it was important, both personally and professionally, to create a record of library education in that specific time and place, before so much was destroyed by civil war. Returning to DCU from my two-year career break, I was encouraged to write about the experience by the Library Director Alan MacDougall and his wife Jennifer; she had grown up in Ghana and had a personal interest in libraries in West Africa. At that time few Irish librarians were publishing; those that were tended to be at senior levels. There was no expectation to publish and my writing - as I imagine was and is the case for most librarians who are writing - was carried out outside of work.
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Choosing something that you are passionately interested in to research is a great first step on the road to successful academic writing but it can be difficult to keep the momentum going. Deborah Lupton explains how old-fashioned whiteboards and online networking go hand-in-hand, and offers advice for when it is time to just ‘make a start’ or go for a bike ride.
As part of preparing for a workshop on academic publishing for early career academics, I jotted down some ideas and tips to share with the group which I thought I would post here. In the process of writing 12 books and over 110 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters over a career which has mostly been part-time because of juggling the demands of motherhood with academic work, I have developed some approaches that seem to work well for me.
Popular writing should be as rigorous as scholarship — but much easier to read
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
Education plays a significant role in everyone’s lives. It helps in the growth of personality and transforming identity. Not to mention, but most of us have spent our childhood at school. During this time, we did/do many things that directly affect our lives and have been important for us in the long. Although at times, we fail to recognize its relevance, in some way or the other, they affect our lives. In our life, academic learning is one such thing that contributes a lot to make us a complete human being. Good qualities and habits get developed during this stage of life and stay with us forever. The major part of this academic life revolves around classrooms, lectures and other extra-curricular activities. Also, during this academic stage, we have to go through various grading and assessment processes, which make us confident and enhance our perseverance. For instance, academic writing is an integral part of the school module and often carries a significant amount of marks for students. Academic writing is a tedious process, and most of us write different assignments and projects just to achieve better marks. These grades play a vital role in building up our career and are crucial enough in positioning us as a scholar.
Academic writing is a difficult and creative undertaking and advice to authors can often be to follow a single method or to copy the approaches of other academics. In this post Chris Smith draws on his years of experience working as an academic writing coach, to provide 10 counter-intuitive insights to help you understand and improve your own writing practice.
As a writing coach I sometimes find myself giving the same pointers and tips again and again. Over the years, I’ve grown accustomed to the raised eyebrows these tips can generate. They seem unconventional and counter intuitive. They’re often not received academic wisdom.
In today's post we are sharing with you this collection of some excellent guides to help you with the teaching of writing and help your students improve their writing style. The collection comprises several classic titles and seminal works as recommended by Paul Silvia in his popular book ‘How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing”.
Here's something most educators can agree on: many students struggle with academic writing. Assigned essays and papers cause stress and, consequently, procrastination and even plagiarism. As a rule, such reaction is due to the lack of writing skills, critical thinking, and understanding of the topic. To help mentees master academic writing, share these seven tools with them. The instruments cover all steps a student takes on the way to crafting an essay: research, outlining, writing, editing, and proper citing.
Peer review not only helps to maintain the quality and integrity of scientific literature but is also key to a researcher’s development. As well as offering opportunities to keep abreast of current research and hone critical analysis skills, writing a peer review can teach you how to spot common flaws in research papers and improve your own chances of being a successful published author. To coincide with the recent launch of the Publons Academy – a free, online, practical peer review training programme for new academics – Jo Wilkinson asked an expert panel of researchers what steps they take to ensure a rigorous and robust review. Their advice has been compiled into the following 12 steps, relevant to both first-time peer reviewers and those keen to brush up on their skills.
What’s the secret to a productive spell of writing? Chris Smith shares insights gleaned from interviews with a diverse group of academics, from which a number of common academic writing habits stood out. These range from the simple acts of scheduling and setting self-imposed deadlines, to both formal and informal accountability partnerships and the use of “freewriting” techniques which help authors write their way out of blocks.
Before having your paper accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal you’ll almost certainly be required to revise your manuscript at least once. But for less experienced authors this may not always feel so straightforward. Deborah Lupton has compiled a list of quick tips for authors who have been asked to revise their article. Remember that being exposed to critique is an inevitable part of academic writing, challenge yourself to improve your work, address all reviewer comments, and you’ll be ready to resubmit.
The role of networked learning in academics’ writing
The project’s aim was to develop an online course providing support for students in writing an academic paper or thesis.
This course is available in a number of languages and free of charge.
The Academic Writing Styles Infographic on APA and MLA styles presents the main characteristics you should keep in mind while writing a research paper.
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Scoop.it!
This may be useful for EAP students.