Improve Your Writing

Check out Bristol Universities excellent Improve Your Writing web pages...

Source http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm

Grammarly | Instant Grammar Check - Plagiarism Checker - Online Proofreader - UPDATED

UPDATE (16.3.15): I have uninstalled Grammarly for a number of reasons. It's grasp of the English language (UK English) was even worse than mine! The WORD plug-in is NOT free and tooo expensive me thinks, particularly when there are free alternatives. There have also been some rather scathing reviews...

A useful one on the Grammarist blog rather supports my experience and identifies a few other short comings, the comments are also of interest...

And another critical review by no less than the Economist, they are less than impressed with Grammarly on a number of counts...

Just glad I did't fork out any cash...

Try Writers Diet it's free and it does a similar job. I have an article here.

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Check out the Grammarly Blog

Writing Your Way to Happiness

Re-blogged from an article by Tara Parker-Hope from The New York Times - Link

The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.

Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioural changes and improve happiness.

The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn't get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health...

A ...study asked married couples to write about a conflict as a neutral observer. Among 120 couples, those who explored their problems through writing showed greater improvement in marital happiness than those who did not write about their problems.

“These writing interventions can really nudge people from a self-defeating way of thinking into a more optimistic cycle that reinforces itself,” said Timothy D. Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor and lead author of the Duke study.

...

Dr. Wilson, whose book “Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By,” was released in paperback this month, believes that while writing doesn’t solve every problem, it can definitely help people cope. “Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it,” he said.


Comments
Alan GelbEast Chatham
I was fascinated to read your article, as I am publishing a book with Tarcher Penguin this August entitled Having the Last Say: Capturing Your Legacy in One Small Story, which encourages older people to write short narratives that in some way reflect an ethic or moral value that they have lived by. With my pilot group of adult writers who participated in this work, I was able to see the therapeutic results of engaging in that kind of life review through the written word...

IClaudiusUSVI
Daily writing leads to happiness, and one of the best books that I have read on this topic is "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" by Suzette Elgin.


Other links which may be of interest:-
The Benefits of Writing
Setting, Elaborating, and Reflecting on Personal Goals Improves Academic Performance
Self Authoring

The Writers Diet

The Writers Diet Test is a diagnostic tool that assesses whether your sentences are flabby or fit. Originally developed for academic writers, the test has also proven popular with students, technical writers, business analysts, journalists, and even fiction writers. 

Based on a simple algorithm, the Writers Diet Test calculates the fitness of your writing sample in each of the five grammatical categories. The higher the percentage of highlighted words, the flabbier your score.

I tried Writers Diet when I was writing the abstract for a paper, the first time I had undertaken such a task. Using this tool I managed to get my writing from the Heart Attack zone into the Lean (best) and Fit & Trim zones. I learned more about the correct usage of words by analysing those 500 words than I learned in 5 years of English lessons. Analysis reduced the number of "flabby" prepositions in this piece making it Fit & Trim!

This is a display of the analysis of these words.

Scrivner or MS Word? - Updated

I am 9 months into my PhD and I have to say I am progressing better than expected on some fronts. But, and there is always a but, I am not without issues! One of my worst failings is the organisation of my research literature and associated writing and notes. I am on  my 7th essay of around 6000 words and in the process have accumulated a mass of reprints and books not to mention Zotero entries.  Do I just accept that I am disorganised or do I try to do something about it before it becomes an irreversible problem?

I was reading a blog update email from The Thesis Whisperer (TTW), one of my favourite sources of inspiration and advice. The post was titled "How to write faster" and one of the paragraphs was about Scrivener, to quote from the website, Scrivener is:

Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.

 Like TTW I have used Microsoft Word (MS Word) for ever and despite still struggling to find my way around version 2010 on occasions, I am fairly comfortable with it. So the thought of having to start all over again fills me with dread. These were TTW's thoughts when she changed over in January 2011:-

This week I started using ‘Scrivener’ for writing my research papers. It’s a word processing program which has been on the Mac for some years, but only now is being developed for the PC.

It took less than 5 minutes to start loving this program. In a single morning I had a decent draft of a paper, which can sometimes take me weeks. I wasn’t at all surprised to read in the bio of the developer that writing this software was part of his “struggle to put together a PhD thesis” because I think it fits research writing like a glove. 

Well those words are encouraging. However these are the comments from TTW's latest post, September 2013:-

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will know this is the key reason I am a huge Scrivener fan. Scrivener is a different kind of word processor that enables you to write ‘chunks’ and move them around easily (you can read more about Scrivener here and download a free trial here).

Although I prefer to use Scrivener, it is not always possible, or desirable, to use it end to end in a given writing project. I often find myself collaborating with other MS Word users (ie: 99% of the writing world) and there are certain things Word does well (in particular tables). Luckily translating my text from Scrivener to Word and back again is very easy.

Since the productivity boost from Scrivener is in the drafting process, I stay there as long as I can before switching to MS Word. I overcome some of the problems of MS Word by creating subheadings and assigning styles to them. Then I make a table of contents so these subheadings become clickable links at the start of my document. It’s not perfect, but it enables me to ‘teleport’ around the text more easily during the final editing process.

Time and experience has obviously influenced TTW's initial enthusiasm for Scrivener, it is interesting to note that she has now found a working model that combines the virtues of both Scrivener and MS Word. I have downloaded the demo version of Scrivener and I will give it a go. Watch this space for my feedback.

UPDATE - 11th October 2013 - I downloaded the trial version of Scriviner with the intention of giving it a good try. Unfortunately after opening the programme and having a quick look around I closed it and have not opened it again. I decided rightly or wrongly that life is too short to start finding my way around a new piece of sofware on top of all my other pressing demands. I have reverted back to using Microsoft OneNote and expanding my knowledge of Zotero's ever expanding capabilities. Sorry Scriviner!

How NOT to write a PhD thesis

In a Times Higher Education article, Tara Brabazon gives her top ten tips for doctoral failure. As I complete my first, not very good essay, I am only too aware of how prophetic the advice in this article may prove to be.
From the article:-

...I understand the angst, worry and stress of supervisors, but I have experienced the other side of the doctoral divide. Examining PhDs is both a pleasure and a curse. It is a joy to nurture, support and help the academy’s next generation, but it is a dreadful moment when an examiner realises that a script is so below international standards of scholarship that there are three options: straight fail, award an MPhil or hope that the student shows enough spark in the viva voce so that it may be possible to skid through to major corrections and a full re-examination in 18 months.
When confronted by these choices, I am filled with sadness for students and supervisors, but this is matched by anger and even embarrassment. What were the supervisors thinking? Who or what convinced the student that this script was acceptable?

Therefore, to offer insights to postgraduates who may be in the final stages of submission, cursing their supervisors who want another draft and further references, here are my ten tips for failing a PhD. If you want failure, this is your road map to getting there.

1. Submit an incomplete, poorly formatted bibliography
2. Use phrases such as “some academics” or “all the literature” without mitigating statements or references
3. Write an abstract without a sentence starting “my original contribution to knowledge is…”
4. Fill the bibliography with references to blogs, online journalism and textbooks
5. Use discourse, ideology, signifier, signified, interpellation, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction without reading the complete works of Foucault, Althusser, Saussure, Baudrillard or Derrida
6. Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago
7. Leave spelling mistakes in the script
8. Make the topic of the thesis too large
9. Write a short, rushed, basic exegesis
10. Submit a PhD with a short introduction or conclusion     

The article contains very sound advice from an informed viewpoint. The follow up comments also contribute some sound advice and information...

Read more here...

Reference

Brabazon, T. (28 January2010) How not to write a PhD thesis. Times Higher Education. Available from: <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410208> [Accessed 9 February 2013].

Note Taking - Cornell Style

Last week I decided to change the way I took notes in the hope that I could make it easier to find what I was looking for when I come to right them up. I decided that a wide left margin would be a good starting point to record keywords, notes on notes etc.  Then I came across a post on my favourite PhD Blog Thesis Whisperer with the title -Turn your notes into writing using the Cornell method. The article describes a rather similar idea for taking notes with the added provision for including a critical summary. Which at some later stage you can probably lift right off the page into your thesis. There is also a link part way down the page for a PDF template for the proposed page layout. You could of course just rule up a notebook yourself with the same layout. I had had the idea of looking for paper ruled in Landscape format to make for wider columns. Whilst it is available, it is not conveniently so. I think I am just about getting the hang of my new note taking method. As Katherine Firth, the author, explains the method much better than I could, I make no apologies for reposting the article here:-

Turn your notes into writing using the Cornell method

December 12, 2012 · by Thesis Whisperer

This post is by Dr Katherine Firth who works in Academic Skills at the University of Melbourne, with a particular interest in research student literacies. Basically, Katherine is a Thesis Whisperer, like me. Unlike me, Katherine is still an active researcher in her field of 20^th-century poetry. Over coffee Katherine told me about the ‘Cornell Method’ and kindly agreed to write a post. I found it enlightening, I hope you do too.
I take a lot of notes.  Even when I was doing my PhD and I was taking thousands of pages of notes, I took them by hand.  I tried using a computer, but there are so many things that are really hard to do on screen (drawing an arrow to make a connection between points, for example) that are really quick on paper.  Also, you only need one hand to write notes, but two hands to type.  And that free hand comes in useful for holding open books, grasping coffee cups, or stuffing your face with Gummi bears.

Now that I’m working with lots of PhD students, I find that they also take a lot of notes.  Years and years of notes.  Notes about field work.  Notes about interviews.  Notes about lab results.  Notes about books they’ve read. And then they get stuck.  Because they have to turn the notes into a thesis.  And that’s really hard.

Writing Skeletons

As an inexperienced academic writer one of the most difficult aspects academic writing is designing an appropriate skeleton or scaffold. Professor Pat Thomson offers sound advice in her blog Patter. She and her partner Barbara Kamler borrow paragraphs from Swales and Feak's book, Academic writing for graduate students a series of skeleton (i), which she uses in her academic writing workshops. I reproduce them here:-
Re-bloged from Patter

The Academic Phrasebank

This is a very usable resource for the developing academic writer. It was created by John Morley, director of University-Wide Language Programmes at the University of Manchester. I can do no better that repost the introductory page from the site.

Reposted from Academic Phrasebank

Bloomer List of Verbs

Bloomers List of Verbs

Knowledge

Count, Define, Describe, Draw, Find, Identify, Label, List, Match, Name, Quote, Recall, Recite, Sequence, Tell, Write

Comprehension

Conclude, Demonstrate, Discuss, Explain, Generalize, Identify, Illustrate, Interpret, Paraphrase, Predict, Report, Restate, Review, Summarize, Tell

Application

Apply, Change, Choose, Compute, Dramatize, Interview, Prepare, Produce, Role-play, Select, Show, Transfer, Use

Analysis

Analyze, Characterize, Classify, Compare, Contrast, Debate, Deduce, Diagram, Differentiate, Discriminate, Distinguish, Examine, Outline, Relate, Research, Separate,

Synthesis

Compose, Construct, Create, Design, Develop, Integrate, Invent, Make, Organize, Perform, Plan, Produce, Propose, Rewrite

Evaluation

Appraise, Argue, Assess, Choose, Conclude, Critic, Decide, Evaluate, Judge, Justify, Predict, Prioritize, Prove, Rank, Rate, Select,

An Infomatics version of Bloomers List of Verbs  can be found here.