Plan your Writing Good planning is an essential part of tight academic writing. Some of the benefits include: a clear idea of the purpose of each section of your document greater directness, brought on by greater confidence in your purpose in writing improved control over your word count lower risk of including extraneous information. Stick … Read more
The problem In the complicated workplace of punctuation, the poor old hyphen needs to form a union. It dutifully performs its role of joining compound words and reliably appears when a suffix or prefix needs assistance. However, many students and writers drag the overworked hyphen into use while the en dash and em dash rest … Read more
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads – Dr Seuss After spending hours, days and sometimes years researching an essay, article or thesis, it can be difficult to squeeze all that valuable information into the designated word count. Knowing how to sacrifice words … Read more
This is not a command from a particularly cranky and irritated supervisor, but an increasingly popular strategy used to facilitate short bursts of productive writing in a fun and social setting. ‘Fun’ and ‘social’ are not words students or academics generally use to describe the hard slog of the usually solitary pursuit of academic writing, … Read more
It doesn’t really matter to a two-year-old watching a certain classic Australian pre-school TV program whether the lyrics of the introductory song read ‘theirs a bare in they’re’, ‘there’s a bare in their’ or ‘there’s a bear in there’ (the correct version); because they all sound the same. English has an abundance of groups of … Read more
The comma is one of the most common and important punctuation marks in the English language. It is also one of the most commonly misused. It is not uncommon when asking someone why he or she has used a comma incorrectly to receive answers like ‘because it just looked like it needed one’, or ‘I … Read more