Grappling with grammar? Struggling with punctuation? Whether you′re writing an essay or assignment, report or dissertation, this useful guide shows you how to improve the quality of your work at university – fast – by identifying and using the correct use of English grammar and punctuation in your academic writing. Using tried and tested advice from student workshops, Alex Osmond shares practical examples that illustrate common mistakes, and shows you how to avoid them. You’ll also discover guidance on: Writing structure – the what and how of crafting sentences and paragraphs Conciseness – how to express your point succinctly and clearly, showing you understand the topic Effective proofreading – the importance of the final ‘tidy up’, so your work is ready to hand in Referencing – common systems, and how to reference consistently (and avoid plagiarism). This new edition also includes separate chapters on critical thinking and referencing, exploring each topic in more detail, and learning outcomes in every chapter, so you can identify what new skills you’ll take away. The Student Success series are essential guides for students of all levels. From how to think critically and write great essays to planning your dream career, the Student Success series helps you study smarter and get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips and resources for study success!

Grappling with grammar? Worrying about referencing? This handy guide is packed with practical advice on how to search for reading materials, structure your academic writing, think critically, reference appropriately and use language effectively. ‘Top Tips’ throughout the book help eradicate all the common mistakes that bring your marks down. What′s new to the fourth edition? two brand new chapters on reading and writing critically activities at the end of each chapter to let you check and assess your own writing. With real life examples of academic work, and plenty of ‘dos’ and ‘don′ts’, this is the perfect writing manual for students studying at all levels, and the ideal book to help you get top marks for all your education course assignments. The Student Success series are essential guides for students of all levels. From how to think critically and write great essays to planning your dream career, the Student Success series helps you study smarter and get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips and resources for study success!

Exploring Options is designed to help student writers develop their knowledge and use of academic language to meet the demands of college- and university-level writing assignments. It draws on the research identifying lexical and grammatical patterns across academic contexts and provides authentic reading contexts for structured vocabulary learning. Recognizing that vocabulary choices in writing often require consideration of grammatical structure, Exploring Options focuses on specific kinds of lexico-grammatical decisions—that is, the ones involving the interaction between vocabulary and grammar--that students face in shaping, connecting, and restructuring their ideas. The book helps writers learn how to effectively use resources such as learner dictionaries, thesauruses, and concordancers to improve academic word knowledge. Following a unit on using resources for vocabulary development, the contents are divided into three parts: Showing Relationships within Sentences, Connecting and Focusing across Sentences, and Qualifying Statements and Reporting Research. Part 1 focuses on verbs and modifiers that express increases and decreases, verbs and abstract nouns that describe change, connectors and verbs describing causal relationships, and parallel structures. Part 2 explores the words that help connect ideas and add cohesion. Part 3 discusses how to express degrees of certainty and accuracy and the use of reporting verbs.

Lecturers request your electronic inspection copy here Whether you’re writing a paper, essay, assignment, or dissertation, this short and punchy book helps you improve your writing skills through minimal effort. Providing you with a quick set of writing rules to follow, this tried and tested guide uses a unique and easy to follow grid-based system. Packed with advice on understanding (big and little) common errors made in academic writing, it helps you identify patterns in your own writing and demonstrates how to reshape or re-evaluate them - and raise your writing game in any academic context. How-to tutorials include: Synthesizing and critiquing literature – and using your coding sheet to develop critical arguments Shaping abstracts, introductions, discussions, and conclusions – to improve the logic and structure of your writing Applying lessons-learned to future projects, whatever format of academic writing. Save time and improve your grades, with this essential quick fix guide! SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

100 Activities for Teaching Study Skills is a sourcebook of activities for study skills tutors, teachers and support staff. This practical, user-friendly guide is designed to complement your existing study skills materials, and provide innovative and imaginative ways for you to motivate and engage your students. Activities include: Study preparation and time management Reading, writing and listening Independent study and group-work Dissertations, reports and projects Critical and creative thinking Revision, examinations and tests. All activities contain clear guidance about the purpose, level and type of activity, along with a range of discussion notes that signpost key issues and research insights. Students are encouraged to reflect on and develop their study skills, while connecting them to subject content and the process of learning, so that they become more motivated, enhance their learning and increase their chances of success.

This book documents the results of a multi-year project that investigated the goals for writing improvement among 45 students and their instructors in intensive courses of English as a Second Language (ESL) then, a year later, in academic programs at two Canadian universities. The researchers present a detailed framework to describe these goals from the perspectives of the students as well as their instructors. The goals are analyzed for groups of students from particular backgrounds internationally, for changes over time, and in relation to the ESL and academic courses. The authors use activity theory, goal theory, various sociolinguistic concepts, and multiple data sources (interviews, observations, stimulated recalls, questionnaires, and text analyses) to provide a contextually-grounded perspective on learning, teaching, writing, second-language development, and curriculum policy. The book will interest researchers, educators, and administrators of ESL, university, college, and literacy programs around the world.

By now it’s a given: if we’re to help our ELLs and SELs access the rigorous demands of today’s content standards, we must cultivate the “code” that drives school success: academic language. Look no further for assistance than this much-anticipated series from Ivannia Soto, in which she invites field authorities Jeff Zwiers, David and Yvonne Freeman, Margarita Calderon, and Noma LeMoine to share every teacher’s need-to-know strategies on the four essential components of academic language. The subject of this volume is grammar and syntax. Here, David and Yvonne Freeman shatter the myth that academic language is all about vocabulary, revealing how grammar and syntax inform our students’ grasp of challenging text. With this book as your roadmap, you’ll learn how to: Teach grammar in the context of students’ speech and writing Use strategies such as sentence frames, passives, combining simple sentences into more complex sentences, and nominalization to create more complex noun phrases Assess academic language development through a four-step process Look inside and discover the tools you need to help students master more sophisticated and complex grammatical and syntactical structures right away. Better yet, read all four volumes in the series and put in place a start-to-finish instructional plan for closing the achievement gap.

Not sure how to start your essay or prepare for a presentation? Worried about how to structure your report? Questioning what a good assignment actually looks like? With encouraging, jargon-free advice and a clearly defined seven-step plan to getting better grades, this book takes the fear out of academic writing and gives you the tools you need to succeed. Punchy and packed with the dos and don’ts of good writing, it helps you improve your grades quickly and with minimal hassle. Covering not just essays, but also group work, reports, reviews, research projects, journaling, and presentations, it provides effective tips on: Defeating writers’ block Identifying and using relevant sources Planning and outlining strategies Building arguments and providing evidence Developing critical and analytical thinking Cultivating writing style Mastering presentation. Focused on explaining and demonstrating the core requirements of academic assignments through detailed examples, this book provides all the support you need to build confidence and produce high-quality assignments. The Student Success series are essential guides for students of all levels. From how to think critically and write great essays to planning your dream career, the Student Success series helps you study smarter and get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips and resources for study success!

The relationship of supervisor to student has traditionally been seen as one of apprenticeship, in which much learning is tacit, with the expectation that the student will become much like the tutor. The changing demographics of higher education in conjunction with imperatives of greater accountability and support for research students have rendered this scenario both less likely and less desirable and unfortunately many supervisors are challenged by the task of guiding non-native speaker students to completion. This handbook is the ideal guide for all supervisors working with undergraduate and postgraduate non-native speaker students writing a thesis or dissertation in English as it explicitly unpacks thesis writing, using language that is accessible to research supervisors from any discipline.

There is now a great need for people within education (both students and teachers) to engage critically with research and it is supported by the Department for Education, Ofsted and the teaching community. This books shows how to read journal articles critically, how to assess the robustness of research claims and the relevance of the results.