Literacy & Writing Skills
Additional reference material
- General
- Online Guides: Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar
- Detailed US Grammar Sites
- Online Guides: Essay Writing and Study Skills
- Other study skills websites
General
- Thinking Writing: A Guide to Writing-Intensive Teaching and Learning
- An exciting website hosted at Queen Mary, University of London. On these webpages Sally Mitchell argues that the best way to improve student writing is through frequent small-scale writing tasks embedded within degree modules.
- Royal Literary Fund Fellows
- The Royal Literary Fund, a benevolent fund for authors, has since 1999 been running a fellowship scheme that places writers in UK HE institutions. RLF fellows work part-time within departments to help students develop their writing skills in optional one-to-one sessions. There are two articles about the scheme in the English Subject Centre Newsletter, by Siobhàn Holland and Katharine McMahon (a description of the experiences of an RLF Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire).
- Active Reading: An Interim Report
- An English Subject Centre Newsletter article by Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson describing a project based at the University of Teesside. Active Reading is also the title of a book by the two project-holders about the use of creative writing and rewriting on HE literature courses.
- Garbl’s Writing Resources
- A US guide to internet writing resources.
Online Guides: Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar
- Improve your Writing Skills
- An attractively laid-out, concise and easy to read guide to basic spelling, punctutation and grammar, aimed squarely at students. No exercises. Provided free by the company Mantex, online at the University of Bournemouth site or as a download on the Mantex site.
- Skillswise (BBC)
- Zappy quizzes and games to test very basic grammar, punctuation and spelling.
- The Internet Grammar of English
- Produced by the Survey of English Usage at University College London and funded by the JISC. Thorough and authoritative, but not a beginner’s site.
Detailed US Grammar Sites
- Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
- This site contains a wealth of downloadable handouts on grammar, spelling, punctuation and study skills.
- LEO: Literacy Education Online (St. Cloud State University)
- A mass of hints about all sorts of aspects of writing.
- Englishpage
- A collection of detailed online tutorials on grammatical topics.
- The Tongue Untied
- Contains grammar information and quizzes and exercises, arranged in chapters like a book. Designed originally for journalism students.
Online Guides: Essay Writing and Study Skills
- Essay Writing: A Guide for Undergraduates
- A detailed online guide written by David Kennedy for the Royal Literary Fund. It is designed both as ‘a resource to help undergraduate students with all aspects of the writing process’ and as ‘an aid for RLF Fellows in dealing with queries from students’.
Many UK HE institutions now include detailed guidance on essay-writing and other study skills on their websites. Useful examples currently available outside their home institutions (and intended, by and large, to be used across all disciplines) include the following:
Other study skills websites
- Study Skills Online (Martin Greenhow, Brunel University)
- Not an official Brunel site. Includes guidance on a wide range of skills, including reading, drafting UCAS statements and exam technique as well as essay-writing.
- skills4study
- Guidance on a range of study skills from the publisher Palgrave in the form of summaries/extracts from Palgrave books.
- Paradigm Online Writing Assistant
- A US site offering detailed advice on research and essay structure.
- Royal literary fund fellows - Essay Guide
- The Royal Literary Fund's online guide to everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about writing undergraduate essays.
