General tips: Before you start your essay, you might want to look at this site for some good general advice on academic essay writing: Click here to visit site.
Researching your topic: Click here for a good tutorial on how to find and evaluate different types of information, such as books, journal articles, magazines, indexes, library catalogues, and the internet.
Click
here for a good site to help you with searching
the internet efficiently.
Because anyone can put anything on the internet, it is important to
be able to assess which sites are good sources for your essay. For
help with evaluating internet sources, click
here.
For hints on reading your sources and taking notes efficiently click here.
You may incorporate your sources into your essay in several ways including paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting. For explanations and examples click here.
Plagiarism (using someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas as if they were your own) is a serious academic offence. To avoid plagiarism, you must document your sources carefully. For a definition of plagiarism and tips on how to avoid it see this statement from the University of Waterloo Faculty of Arts.
There are several different systems for documenting your sources. Make
sure you ask your professor which one he/she wants you to use. The
most common ones are:
For social sciences: APA
For arts: MLA
For general use: Chicago/Turabian
RefWorks is a great new tool for managing your references and formatting your papers in whatever style you choose.
There are several aspects to the well-organized essay and each of them needs to be taken seriously. The following list is a guideline only; remember, you must write your essays in accordance with your instructor’s demands. If you are ever unsure what is required in an essay assignment, ask your instructor for help first.
Defining a topic: before you begin writing your essay, check out this website for a few pointers on understanding the topic you will be writing on.
Then go to this
website for excellent suggestions on planning your
essay:
For an overview of the essay structure, and key element in each of
the main parts (introduction, thesis, body, conclusion), click
here.
Thesis statements: perhaps one of the hardest things to write in an
essay is the thesis, and this
site will help you with a good
thesis.
Paragraphs – for an introduction to paragraphs, click
here.
Then click here for
more suggestions about topic sentences and paragraph structure.
Now you have to edit and revise your essay. First click
here for general information.
For suggestions on checking grammar, click
here.
For proofreading strategies, click here.
To help you check for wordiness, this site is excellent.
The apostrophe is
necessary when you really mean it’s instead
of its - click
here for more information:
Commas can be tricky, and this
site may alleviate some
of the confusion:
It’s also beneficial to know how to proofread for
commas, click
here for more information.
Use hyphens with care, click
here for more information.
Go to this
site for an overview on using quotation marks:
What is a clause? This
site will help you identify different types
of sentences.
To learn about sentence fragments and how to avoid them, click
here.
The following sites outline how one can effectively punctuate sentences:
Module15
Module 25
Module 26
Click here to understand, and deal with, misused modifiers.
Click here for help with choosing suitable words.
Click here to avoid wordiness.
Wordiness: danger signals and ways to react - click here.
Unbiased language - click here.
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