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
Have you ever been told that your writing style is not academic or that it is too informal? Are you unsure what rules to follow, what you can do and what you should not do? Formality Academic writing needs to be formal and impersonal. This means that your writing should be clear, concise and professional.
This article is part of the series ‘How to Write Distinction Essays Every Time: The Six Steps to Academic Essay Writing’. One article in this series will be published on the Editex blog each day this week. Writing the first draft has never been so easy! Now that you have completed your research in an
This article is the final article of the series ‘How to Write Distinction Essays Every Time: The Six Steps to Academic Essay Writing’. These articles have all been published on this blog. Once you have completed writing your essay, it is vital that you have it professionally edited by an academic editor. You have just
Before you start writing your essay, it is important that you plan it. Below is an example of what an essay plan should look like (including explanations and tips), and how much detail it should contain. You can use this as a guide for your essay plans. We’ve created a handy Essay Template to help
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
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,
In academic writing, students are often encouraged to use an ‘objective’ voice; to focus on methodologies, arguments, evidence and results in a way that keeps the author/researcher in the background. Passive sentence structures, which place emphasis on what is being done to the sentence’s subject, are especially common in science disciplines where researchers emphasise results
Students often overuse italics in their essays and theses. Here are some facts about italics that can help improve your writing: Italics can be used for foreign language words. For example, ‘It was a quid pro quo agreement’. However, note that ‘et. al’, ‘ibid’, ‘e.g.’ and other Latin words used in referencing are not
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
