Study resources
These external resources have been compiled for you to work independently or for your tutor to assist you and/or direct you to during an appointment.
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Concision, clarity and effectiveness
- Active and passive voice
- Appropriate language
- Coherence: Transitions between ideas
- Gender-fair use of language
- Gender-neutral language
- Improving sentence clarity
- One thousand useful words
- Parallel structure
- Passive voice
- Sentence variety
- Should I use "I"?
- Stereotypes and biased language
- Style
- Word choice
- Diversity, equity and inclusion
- Documentation styles
- General writing resources
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Grammar and punctuation
- Adjective or adverb?
- Apostrophes
- Appositives
- Articles
- Capitalization
- Commas
- Commas vs. semicolons
- Conditionals
- Conjunctions
- Dangling modifiers
- Demonstratives: This and that
- Fragments and run-ons
- Gerunds
- Hyphens
- Independent and dependent clauses
- Modal verbs
- Noncount nouns
- Numbers
- Prepositions
- Pronouns
- Punctuation overview
- Qualifiers
- Quotation marks
- Semicolons, colons and dashes
- Sentence fragments
- Sentence starter
- Subject-verb agreement
- Verb tenses (from Purdue OWL)
- Verb tenses (from UNC Writing Center)
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Professional writing
- Application essays
- Business letters
- Business letters: Accentuating the positives
- Cover letters
- CVs and résumés
- Email communication
- Grant proposals
- How to communicate on LinkedIn
- LinkedIn (resources for students)
- Management résumés
- Reference sheets
- Résumés
- Skills inventory
- Tailoring employment documents to a specific audience
- Terms and tips for the international student's job search
- Writing the curriculum vitae
- Writing the personal statement
- Research
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Resources for multilingual learners
- Activities for ESL students
- Collocations
- Collocation examples for English learners
- Common mistakes in emails (collocation errors)
- ESL Cafe
- International Students' Library Research Guide (from SJSU King Library)
- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
- Speaking tips for non-native speakers
- Visuwords: Visual Dictionary and Thesaurus
- Youglish
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Specific writing tasks and assignments
- Abstracts
- Annotated bibliographies
- Argument
- Argumentation/persuasion: Logic in argumentative writing
- Comparing/contrasting
- Dissertations
- Essay exams
- Honors theses
- Literary analysis
- Literature reviews
- Oral history
- Poetry explications
- Resources for preparing presentations
- Rhetorical analysis
- Scientific research reports
- Speeches
- Systematic review (five steps)
- Systematic review (planning guidance)
- The writing process