RESOURCES

Writing Academic Essays

• "Elements of the Essay" by Gordon Harvey

• Writing Tools by the Writing Center at Harvard University, which includes guides to topics such as "How to Do a Close Reading," "Developing a Thesis," and "How to Do a Comparative Analysis."

• Writing Center Handouts from the Writing Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which includes handouts on aspects of academic essays (like "Arguments" and "Logical Fallacies"), and ideas on writing for specific fields (for art history, philosophy, and sciences, for example).

• Writing Handbook by the Writing Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison, which includes ideas on how to write scientific reports and reviews of literature.

• Writing an Abstract by the Writing Center at Renselar Polytechnic Institute

• "Balanced Writing" by Stephen Donatelli. How should you move between detail and abstraction in an essay?

Research/Working with Sources

• "Writing with Sources" by Gordon Harvey

• Research and Documentation Companion site to Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference, this suggests major databases for various subjects and shows how to document sources for papers written in the humanities, social sciences, history, and sciences.

• With the help of the NUS Science Library, the Writing Centre held two workshops on Oct 4 and 18, 2003 for USP students on how to use science databases. Our thanks to Ms. Chew Hooi Tze, Mrs. Hew Yik Suan, and Ms. Kan Sok Cheng for conducting the workshops, and AP Rudolf Meier for his help in organizing them.

  You can download the powerpoint presentation for the beginners' workshop here, and the presentation for the advanced workshop here.

• Evaluating Sources from Bedford/St Martin's.

• Citing online sources with examples using different style guides, also from Bedford/St Martin's.

Style

• Punctuation Made Simple by Gary Olson

• "Tips on Grammar, Punctuation and Style" by the Writing Center at Harvard University

Dictionaries

• Oxford English Dictionary (only accessible if you are logged on within NUS)

• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

• Merriam-Webster Online

Concordances
Unlike dictionaries, which give only the definition of a word, concordances give examples of how the word is commonly used in proper context.

• Corpus Concordance Sampler

• The British National Corpus Concordancer

Other Writing Centres

• Harvard University Writing Center

• The Writing Center at University of Carolina at Chapel Hill

• The Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Purdue University Online Writing Lab