Writing Help
This guide contains writing resources and information for students.
Common Grammatical Errors
- Writing with precision: Tuning up your pronounsIn academic essays, avoid first-person pronouns (I, me, my, we, us our) when they don’t serve a useful purpose.
- Revising for precision: Catching dangling participlesGetting rid of dangling participles will make your writing more clear, precise, and grammatical.
- Hyphens & dashesHyphens, dashes, and parentheses are just a few tools that can help give your writing more diversity, allowing you to convey the subtlety.
- ParallelismWhen presenting a series of two or more similar items (e.g., items in a list, duties in a job description, steps in a procedure, or glossary entries), write all items using the same (i.e., parallel) structure.
- Pronoun usageUse plural forms for general statements to avoid sexist language, the ungrammatical use of “they,” and awkward “he or she” combinations.
- "Affect" vs "effect"The affect/effect distinction poses a challenge for many writers. Because these words are used commonly, it is worth investing a little time in learning this distinction.
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Revising Strategies
- Planning for revision: Develop your own checklistMake a common error checklist that you can pull out before the next assignment.
- Using transitions to improve your writingTransitions are words and phrases that aid readers in seeing the connection between ideas in sentences and paragraphs.
Sentence-level Errors
- Identifying and fixing sentence fragmentsWhile fragments can be found in advertising and informal writing, they are viewed as a serious problem in academic and business writing.
- "That" vs. "Which"Grammar series.
Student Success Centre
- Last Updated: Oct 30, 2023 1:33 PM
- URL: https://libguides.ucalgary.ca/guides/writinghelp
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