Written by Liselotte Brandstrup

 

Perhaps you are a brand new PhD student or just new to academic writing in general. Or perhaps you are well established in academia but feel that your language skills could do with a bit of help.

Below you will find two tools that can help you improve your writing.

An academic writing confidence booster

The Academic Phrasebank can be a useful resource for academic writers. It provides examples of key phrases not only organized by the main sections of a scholarly paper (e.g., introducing work, referring to sources, describing methods, reporting results, discussing findings, and writing conclusions) but also broken down by the communicative functions they serve (e.g. being critical, describing trends, or giving examples).

Example: describing  trends

Example: being critical –> Identifying a weakness in a single study or paper

The purpose of the Academic Phrasebank is to assist academic writers in both thinking about content and organizing their writing. You still need to be creative, and a degree of adaptation will be required.

Fun fact: The Academic Phrasebank was designed for non-native English-speaking academic and scientific writers. However, recent data shows that a majority of the users are in fact native speakers, and they too find the Phrasebank helpful.

Visit the Academic Phrasebank

Find out more about the ideas behind the Academic Phrasebank.
 

Writefull for proofreading

Writefull is a useful tool for proofreading. Writefull can check an entire document, a individual paragraph or a selected chunk of writing. Suggested edits when in proofread mode include grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling, and style. You can also opt for edits on word order and phrasing when in full edit mode.

Writefull also boasts a whole parade of widgets.One of them is a sentence palette, a browseable collection of academic sentences similar to what you will find in the Academic Phrasebank.

If you dive deeper, you need to create an account and add Writefull to your Word application.

 

In MS Word, simply click Insert, select Get add-ins, and search for Writefull.