Machine generated contents note: Writing at university -- What's in this book? -- Basic conventions of academic writing -- Basic grammatical concepts -- Putting sentences together -- Putting paragraphs together -- Critical thinking and referencing -- Conciseness and clarity -- Common mistakes and how to deal with them -- Proofreading effectively -- Notes on the text and the conventions I follow -- Different subjects -- Referencing -- 1.Basic Conventions of Academic Writing -- Using acronyms -- Establishing objectivity -- Referencing correctly -- Avoiding slang/colloquial language -- Avoiding emotive language -- Avoiding the first person -- Avoiding the second person -- Avoiding contractions -- Simplicity, clarity and conciseness -- Further reading -- 2.Basic Grammatical Concepts -- Types of words -- Nouns, proper nouns, concrete nouns, abstract nouns and plurals -- Verbs -- Pronouns -- Articles -- Modifiers (describing words and phrases) -- Adjectives -- Adverbs --

Contents note continued: Conjunctions -- Prepositions -- Summing up -- Further reading -- 3.Putting Sentences Together -- Subject-verb-object -- Active and passive -- Removing the subject of the sentence -- Emphasising the object of the sentence -- Varying your sentence structure -- Tense -- The most common tenses in academic writing -- Avoiding continuous tenses where possible -- Hedging -- Punctuation -- . The full stop -- ? The question mark -- ! The exclamation mark -- , The comma -- The colon -- ; The semi-colon -- () Brackets/parentheses -- [] Square brackets -- - The hyphen/dash -- ' The apostrophe -- Further reading -- 4.Putting Paragraphs Together -- Signposting language -- Topic sentences and staying on topic -- What, why, when -- Further reading -- 5.Critical Thinking and Referencing -- Referencing -- The different referencing systems/styles -- Harvard referencing/the author--date system -- Vancouver or numeric referencing -- Footnotes --

Contents note continued: Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Psychological Association (APA) referencing -- OSCOLA -- The `p' word: plagiarism -- Critical thinking -- More complex referencing techniques -- Ellipsis -- Square brackets -- Summing up -- Further reading -- 6.Conciseness and Clarity -- Watch those word counts -- Redundant phrases -- Other redundant phrases -- Avoiding expletive constructions -- Using simple words instead of complex ones -- Simple sentences -- Does this belong here? -- Meaningless modifiers: `very'/`really'/`extremely'/`severely' (and so on) -- The future tense/unnecessary signposting -- Avoiding repetition -- The active and passive voices -- Changing negatives to affirmatives -- Removing excessive `nominalisation' -- Using the word `this' -- More examples -- Example one -- Example two -- Example three -- Example four -- Example five -- Further reading -- 7.Common Mistakes and How to Deal With Them -- Mixed constructions --

Contents note continued: Dangling modifiers -- Using `It has been said that...' -- Using `I think/I feel...' -- Avoiding the word `interesting' -- Poor presentation of tables and graphs -- Comma splicing -- Using `of' instead of `have' -- The word `of' and possessive replacements -- `Putting things off' -- 8.Proofreading Effectively -- Distance yourself from your work -- Proofread more than once -- Leave more time than you think you need -- Read your work aloud -- Read from your last sentence back -- Use technology but don't rely on it -- Be ruthless -- Proofread for you... -- ... and keep things in context -- Do your own proofreading.