Writing for academic and work purposes is a skill you need to exert effort to develop. And, being practical, academic writing is not a skill you can easily work on alone. Ideally, lots of feedback is required to get you in the right pace towards your success as fantastic writer. And, the feedback is required from your tutors, friends and colleagues. Writing as a craft needs lots of practice. Practice makes perfect, sounds clichéd but fit perfectly here.
You will also need to learn from the masters of the craft. This you do from selected books for academic writing. If you stay alone most of the time, then books will offer the nearest solution.
It is worth your while to occasionally dip into these literary gems for the purpose of reference but not allowing them to totally dominate your learning. Remember nothing will replace communication and regular feedback for quality in carrying you to your ultimate dream; these are the key to your success!
There are particularly goods book for developing academic writing skills and we would gladly recommend the following books below. You will notice that many of them are the kind of text your teacher uses in the class. All of them are widely available and they all have wonderful references, examples and models that readily help you to write better English.
Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students by Bailey tops the list. Published by Routledge, we recommend this book for the Warwick pre-sessional course in English. It has plenty of useful practice exercises tackling all aspects of academic English. The answer key makes the book even more useful as a self-study tool.
The second is Writing for Academic Success by Craswell. This Sage publication provides very useful suggestions on the process of writing like time management and hints on writing theses and examination answers.
Writing Essays in English Language and Linguistics by Murray, published by Cambridge University Press is a clear and authoritative guide to essay, project and report writing at university level. It’s a handy self-study tool, both for undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Writing at University: A guide for students by Crème, P. and M. Lea is an Open University Press publication. It’s greatly helpful for familiarizing students with what tutors are looking for in writing at university; defining’ critical’ writing.
Also pick Academic Writing Course by Jordan from Nelson/Longman. It has a particularly useful section on linking words and connectors and serves well for out-of-class study in punctuation, spelling, irregular verbs, etc.
The sixth one is Study Writing from Cambridge University Press by Hamp-Lyons, L. and Heasley. This book will introduce you to a large number of key issues in academic writing. There is an answer key to add to the experience.
And finally, Academic Writing for Graduate Students from Michigan University Press by Swales and Feak is what you need this for very good models of academic writing and some useful hints on academic style. It serves well anyone who needs to write up a research paper
