Academic Writing Skills

This page contains resources for developing your writing skills. Many books have been written on the subject, some of them you will find in the bibliography on this page, some books are not so good. Some books that were famous, rightly or wrongly, have been outdated by the natural changes in language and the fundamental changes in the way people present research in the age of information.

The internet contains a vast amount of material on how to write. Some of it is misleading, most of it is not useful, but a little is excellent. This pages and the links on this page were created to present what is (in our opinion) worth reading, studying and making your own.

Online resources that are trustworthy, complete, and useful:

  • Monash University hosts a page entitled Language and Learning Online. It is "a collection of resources to help you improve your academic performance. These resources include online tutorials, interactive exercises, and examples of Writing for Subjects." We have added a subpage to this one to guide you through the most pertinent areas of their vast resource.

  • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a Writing Centre. The full use of this writing centre is restricted to students of the university, but the site has a Handouts Page, filled with an amazing number of documents and videos about everything from the use of commas to how to stop procrastinating. The handouts are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, which means you "may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout (just click print) and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill".

  • Purdue University Writing Lab. The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

  • Online Writing Resources from the Central European University (Budapest). An annotated lists of resources from different universities for students. It covers formal writing, but also reading skills, oral presentations, etc.

Select Bibliography

Eco, Umberto, Farina, Caterina Mongiat and Farina, Geoff . 2015. How to write a thesis. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2014. Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. London, UK: Allen Lane.