Applying for a job is like attempting to please someone when you have never met them before. They give you some clues as to what they want from you in their job advertisement, but you really don't know them or how to convince them that you're the best person for the job.
Academic writing in a report, essay, dissertation or thesis often requires different qualities to other forms of writing. Unlike the average reader who may be reading for pleasure, academic readers read academic writing for facts and evidence. So, an academic writer must adopt a different approach to writing.
We work alongside a wide range of writers with very different writing styles. Experience of working with this wide variety of writers reveals that some produce clearer texts than others. Although a lot of this clairty could be attributed to a writer's articulation and vocabulary, its often the case that clear writers are also able to organise their writing in better ways. So let's take a look at this in more detail.
Problems often arise for non-native English language users when they try to apply the rules that they used to learn English to everything that they encounter later on. Languages are always evolving, often this is a uniform way that conforms with common rules, but sometimes they evolve to push everyday usage away from the rules that they were built upon.
All academics and students at university will have to write a literature review at some point. In a nutshell, a literature review is an attempt to create a complete account of what has been published on a topic. The literature review is usually placed near the beginning of the academic writing in a research paper, essay, research report or thesis.
Active and passive forms of sentence structure can completely alter a reader's understanding of the same message. Active sentences tend to be more forthcoming with their meaning, whereas passive sentences aren’t as straightforward.
A study published on the Science Dailywebsite discusses research carried out at Northumbria University. The research looked at how native speakers interpreted active and passive sentences. Dr Dabrowska’s comments on the results of the study included:
That's right, I've just declared the death of spell check! My last post about the Cupertino Effect should be enough to convince you that relying heavily on spell check is like telling the world you have lost all self respect. If you have read that post and still don't know what I'm talking about then maybe it's time to call it a day.
Whatis.com has published a page dedicated to the Cupertino Effect. This page includes errors which actually made it to press including this beauty:
"Quaker Maid Meats Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef panties that may be contaminated with E. coli. (Reuters)."
Academic referencing can be nothing short of a nightmare because there are so many different styles of referencing out there. Last year I went back to university for the first time in seven years and found that the simple mention of Harvard Referencing conjured up an old, yet familiar nauseous feeling in my stomach (which I hadn’t experienced in precisely seven years).
We have spent our entire careers working with English language development. Each editor has a master-level qualification in a linguistics related subject (minimum) and experience as an English tutor at a university.
Applying for a job is like attempting to please someone when you have never met them before. They give you some clues as to what they want from you in their job advertisement, but you really don't know them or how to convince them that you're the best person for the job.
We work alongside a wide range of writers with very different writing styles. Experience of working with this wide variety of writers reveals that some produce clearer texts than others. Although a lot of this clairty could be attributed to a writer's articulation and vocabulary, its often the case that clear writers are also able to organise their writing in better ways. So let's take a look at this in more detail.
Problems often arise for non-native English language users when they try to apply the rules that they used to learn English to everything that they encounter later on. Languages are always evolving, often this is a uniform way that conforms with common rules, but sometimes they evolve to push everyday usage away from the rules that they were built upon.
All academics and students at university will have to write a literature review at some point. In a nutshell, a literature review is an attempt to create a complete account of what has been published on a topic. The literature review is usually placed near the beginning of the academic writing in a research paper, essay, research report or thesis.
Academic referencing can be nothing short of a nightmare because there are so many different styles of referencing out there. Last year I went back to university for the first time in seven years and found that the simple mention of Harvard Referencing conjured up an old, yet familiar nauseous feeling in my stomach (which I hadn’t experienced in precisely seven years).
