Just like you wear different clothes for different settings – shorts to play basketball, a tuxedo to a prom or wedding, jeans to school every day – there are different types of writing depending on the situation.
One of the challenges for students is switching from genre to genre: a law firm requires a very different writing style than a graduate seminar on political theory.
As your skills develop you’ll be able to identify different genres and ultimately to slip in and out of them, just like you find that perfect dress for a night out or the boots that keep your feet warm and dry on a snowy winter’s day.
Browse Grammar & Mechanics Articles:
Know your audience – presentation skills
Presentation skills culture varies widely from industry to industry, organization to organization. In the absence of specific guidelines or expectations use our concrete guidelines to design and give great presentations. If possible, review examples of previous presentations given at your organization and adjust accordingly.
“To Be” – An Overview for ESL Learners
100 Irregular Verbs in English
A Poster Child for Persuasive Speech: Pharrell Showcasing Rhetoric on The Voice
Abstract Nouns
Adjectives – Overview for ESL Learners
Adjusting Expectations: Excessive Elaboration
Longer is not always better! Limit your sentences to a few clauses, and alternate long sentences and short sentences. Academic writing in English tends to have long, sophisticated noun phrases, but it is not a requirement to include complex sentence structure and long strings of joined clauses.
Adverbs – Overview for ESL Learners
Adverbs of Degree
Adverbs of Manner
Adverbs of Place
Adverbs of Time
ANALYZE Evidence to Support Your Thesis
Actionable tips and examples to help you move deeper into the evidence you’ve already got.
Analyzing Audience to Maximize Your Impact (and Grades)
Understanding how most teachers view student attitudes and approaches to work can help you succeed.
Analyzing Your Audience – the First Rule of Effective Writing
The first step to effective communication? Understanding your audience – including TEACHERS. Specific help for writing for the teacher audience.
Analyzing Your Business Audience
APA Paper Formatting with Sample & Comments
Summary of APA document formatting basics with a sample paper you can download from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue. The sample includes annotations explaining the various rules (PDF).
Apostrophes
Article Use (a, an, the…)
Using articles appropriately is one of the most difficult grammatical points in English to master. It is not necessarily essential in speech, but it’s something that should be checked for when writing.
Assignment Expectations: Excessive Adherence to Inappropriate Structures
It may be confusing, even annoying, but some of the structures you may have learned in test prep classes and English language classes, such as the five-paragraph essay, may not be appropriate for use in other classes. Be careful to follow assignment instructions.
Assignment Expectations: Reflection Writing
Reflection writing assignments are common in many classes, especially as a response to reading assignments. It is distinctive from other types of academic writing because it encourages the writer to write in the first person, but usually it has the same expectations as other academic writing assignments in other ways.
Audience, Purpose, and Tone: Hedging – good and bad
Hedging is a way of using language to make an argument more effective by softening or strengthening it. An idea expressed without appropriate hedging may seem too general, too confident, or too extreme. Specific vocabulary and writing strategies can be learned and used to hedge appropriately.
Audience, Purpose, and Tone: Objectivity
Attempt to cultivate objectivity. Objectivity is an overall goal in academic writing, even if the goal is to convince the reader of something. It demonstrates that the emphasis is on the object – your writing, your research – not on you yourself.
Avoid ‘Just’ Opinions
Avoid a VAGUE Thesis
Avoid Logical GOOFS (Logical Fallacies)
Fallacies are statements that sound logical but, if you stop and think, really aren’t. Avoid in your own writing and critique in others’.
Awkward Construction
Balancing Repetition and Variety
As you learn to write in English, you will learn how to balance repetition and variety, to ensure cohesion. One strategy to accomplish this purpose is to vary the way you refer to people and things. After the first reference to a noun form, you can refer to it with pronouns and demonstratives until the topic changes.
Bibliography
Blasting Through Writers’ Block
Think you’re the only one who stares at the blank screen with feat/anxiety/anger/boredom? Nope. Every writer who ever lived has felt the same way. This resource will walk you through the most common and suggest some ways to deal. There’s always cleaning the bathroom or doing your taxes – if you REALLY want to avoid writing.