Academic writing resources
The resources below are useful to new research students and early career academics.
Editing and writing skills for research students
- Introductory exercises (pdf 127kb) and Solutions to introductory exercises (pdf 127kb)
These should be of particular use to research students writing in English as a second language, or those who find they struggle with grammatical and spelling errors. - Additional editing exercises and possible solutions (pdf 89kb)
These exercises show the writer how to develop a direct writing strategy. - Advanced editing exercises and solutions (pdf 44kb)
These exercises are more challenging and could be attempted if you wish to assess your editing and writing skills. - Advice to research students (pdf 208kb)
This covers editing roles and responsibilities and common stylistic and grammatical errors. One commonly used structure for research papers for journals is presented. Some tips on how to improve your own editing and get best value from editing support provided by Supervisors, are also included. Web links to useful resources developed by other organisations are provided.
Editing tools for research students and staff
- Editing strategies (pdf 104kb)
Involves a system of numbered types of writing faults within documents and drafts written by students. This can be used alone or in combination with replacement text for some or all of the stylistic errors made by the student. The aim is to allow supervisors to edit less but explain more.
Supporting materials
- Numbered faults (pdf 87kb)
Lists and briefly explains the numbered faults and editing symbols and provides a quick grammar lesson. - Explaining the numbered system (pdf 215kb)
Provides multi-layered explanations of each fault, along with corrected examples that may in turn also be written in a more direct style.