Improve Your Writing

To succeed in college and professional jobs you must write well

Improve Your Writing

Index

Information
Advice
Internet Links

INFORMATION 

WARNING: It is impossible to do well in college and in most professional careers without adequate writing skills.  Developing good to excellent writing skills is a valuable key to success in occupations as varied as business, engineering, teaching, psychology, and most medical fields.  

Many students who feel weak in writing put off taking writing courses and hurt their grades in other courses as a result.  Many courses require term papers, essay tests, and many other written assignments that make good writing skills an extremely important prerequisite.

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ADVICE 
Develop good writing skills.  Begin by taking any placement tests as soon as possible.  Enroll in the right level English composition course your first semester in college.  

If English is not your native language, be sure to focus on learning English and learning how to write in English as soon as possible.  You must work much harder to learn to write good English than other students.

=> If you are in college, then your college/university probably has a writing lab to help you with your writing.  Go there and find out if they can help you!

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INTERNET LINKS 
Following are some outstanding sites to help you with your writing and reference materials.  

(TIPS: Find a good writer to read your papers and give you feedback. Seek individual help from instructors. Also, use the Grammar check program on your word processing program.  However, you must carefully check its suggestions against material in the following references if you are not certain that it is correct, because these programs make frequent mistakes.)

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General Writing Help for Anyone 

***** The Elements of Style, William Strunk.  This short classic is the most widely used reference for decades.  Knowing it's principles is a MUST!
http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk1.html

****Paradigm Online Writing Assistant
An excellent free service that guides you though every stage of writing an article or paper with great detailed step-by-step help.
http://www.powa.org/

**** Guide to Grammar and Style  By Jack Lynch
A handy quick reference guide organized by specific topics
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/contents.html

***Jack Lynch's Guide to Writing and Style
andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/  

***Handouts on a variety of writing topics
Purdue University
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/index.html

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Writing Papers for Classes

****Paradigm Online Writing Assistant
An excellent free service that guides you though every stage of writing an article or paper with great detailed step-by-step help.
http://www.powa.org/

Special Writing Help for ESL (English Second Language) Students

***ESL Resources for Students
Purdue University
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/eslstudent.html

On Line Dictionaries and Other Writing References

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (Free on-line).
http://www.bartleby.com/61/

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus

ROGET'S THESAURI 
(1) Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, 3rd ed. 1995. 
Containing 35,000 synonyms in an easy-to-use format, this thesaurus features succinct word definitions. 
http://www.bartleby.com/62/

(2) Roget’s International Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. 1922 
Mawson’s modernization of Roget’s classic structure with over 85,000 hyperlinked cross-references and 2,900 quotations. 
http://www.bartleby.com/110/

QUOTATIONS 
Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations. 1988. 
The most notable quotations since 1950 contains over 10,000 quotations from 4,000 sources and is organized into 25 categories and 60 sections. 
http://www.bartleby.com/63/

Bartlett, John. 1919. Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. 
Including over 11,000 quotations, the first new edition of John Bartlett’s corpus to be published after his death in 1905 keeps most of his original work intact. http://www.bartleby.com/100/

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Self-Help and other resources on this website (and site map)