Writing Resources: A list and suggestions

Hi, I've made a list of writing resources to help students who need to strengthen their writing. One of the obstacles some students encounter in our programme is a lack of sophistication in their writing. In previous posts, I've spoken about the need to make writing critical and how to use Bloom's Taxonomy. This is different from the sophistication of your sentence and paragraph structures and developing a good argument.

To begin with, I recommend a sophisticated grammar book. I suggest the following:

Hewings, Martin, 2005. Advanced Grammar in Use, 2nd ed. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Buy the edition with the answers and the CD Rom with the supplemental exercises if possible.

Additionally, every student should have a good dictionary and thesaurus. Oxford publishes both these tools. A thesaurus helps build vocabulary and word by suggesting different words with different shades of meaning. Accuracy in language use is very important as well. This is why you should use a good comprehensive dictionary with English spellings. After all, University of Leicester is an English university and English spelling is the standard here. I use the Oxford Concise which I find larger and more accurate than smaller, cheaper dictionaries.

In terms of writing, I suggest the following books as complete guides to proper essay and assignment writing:

Bailey, Stephen, 2006. Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students, 2nd ed. London : Routledge.

Jordan, R. R., 1999. Academic Writing Course: Study Skills in English, 3rd ed. Harlow : Pearson Educational Limited.

I hope these resources are useful to students with writing issues.

KB