General Grammar and Vocabulary for Research Writing

This section includes handouts, links, and activities to improve grammar and vocabulary for research writing across fields.

General grammar for research writing

http://louisville.edu/faculty/jlwolf02/writing-about-data/Writing_about_data.pdf/at_download/file

http://www.io.com/~hcexres/textbook/twsent.html

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-228Spring-2007/LectureNotes/index.htm

Useful collection of academic phrases in different parts of the paper

http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/discussions.htm

Academic grammar for the social sciences and humanities

http://ec.hku.hk/acadgrammar/

General English grammar sites

Designed for Chinese students but a very useful general guide

http://learning.cl3.ust.hk/english-grammar-guide/frame.htm

Designed for native speakers

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/

http://www.grammaruntied.com/index.html

http://www.englishpage.com/weeklylesson/weeklylesson.html

http://opengrammar.sentenceworks.com/tiki-index.php

Common errors

http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/style-and-editing/hit-parade-of-errors

http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/english-as-a-second-language

General English Writing Websites

This is a list of useful sites to build general writing skills not specifically for research writing but useful to improve general writing skills.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/678/01/

http://www.powa.org/

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/esl/videos.html

Useful tools for improving vocabulary

http://www.lextutor.ca/

Academic Word Lists

Very useful academic word list. Combine it with the Adobe Advanced PDF search techniques in the Computer-assited writing section of this site to see how these words are used in your field.

http://language.massey.ac.nz/staff/awl/headwords.shtml#top

http://homepage.usask.ca/~dul381/common/ Academic _ Word _ List .doc

Same list linked to the dictionary and a more specific list by field

http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/selfram.htm

Academic Vocabulary Wordlist with exercises

http://web.uvic.ca/~gluton/awl/

Commonly confused words http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/errors.html

American SAT question of the day

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/satofday/index.html

Word of the day for the SAT

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/wordofday/

Learner's Dictionary

Links for specific writing problems

Transitions to connect sentences

Transition words can help you to improve the flow of your writing. These are words like “next, then, in addition, as a result, however,” etc. that connect sentences, paragraphs, or sections to each other logically. The links below are useful but remember that different transitions are more common in different fields. You can check which words are most common by using Adobe Acrobat advanced search functions in the Computer-assisted writing section of this site.

Technical writing transitions

http://www.io.com/~hcexres/tcm1603/acchtml/hirev1.html#trans

General writing transitions

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/style/transitioncues.html

http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/transitions.htm#transitions

Sentence Fragments

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_frag.html

Present Perfect Tense vs Past Tense: http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/410/grammar/ppvpast.htm

Present perfect: good grammar page

http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/presentperfect.html

Conjunctive adverbs

http://grammar.uoregon.edu/conjunctions/conjunctive.html

Specific problems

Review of passive sentence structure

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/539/05/

Gerund or infinitive?

http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/l2ger.html

http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/english-as-a-second-language/gerunds

Subject verb agreement and expressions of quantity

http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/english-as-a-second-language/expressions-of-quantity

How to choose whether to put a comma before WHICH or use THAT in relative clauses

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/645/03/

Gerund (ING) vs relative clause (THAT WHICH)

http://learning.cl3.ust.hk/english-grammar-guide/Word_Form/Gerunds_and_relative_clauses_confusion.htm

Punctuation

Contractions

http://www.hanyangowl.org/media/punctuation/contractions.pdf

Using dashes correctly

http://www.hanyangowl.org/media/punctuation/formatemdash.pdf

http://www.hanyangowl.org/media/punctuation/formatendash.pdf

American and British English formats for quotation marks

http://www.hanyangowl.org/media/punctuation/formatquotationmarks.pdf

Punctuation of a list

http://www.hanyangowl.org/media/punctuation/simplelist.pdf

http://www.io.com/~hcexres/textbook/lists.html

Format of tables and figures

http://www.hanyangowl.org/media/punctuation/tableandfigureformat.pdf

Punctuation of equations in text