Academic English skills for international students
I have just been searching for links to put up on a page for dissertation writing and I am amazed at the number of websites there are offering to write your dissertation for you. In fact, when I google ‘dissertation writing’ the first eight results are all for companies that promise to write you a … Read more
Describing graphs is a popular task in the IELTS exam and students are expected to come up with sentences such as: The rate of unemployment fell dramatically after 1983.. and The rate of inflation peaked in 1987 before declining gradually… What you need to think about is not only the verb (fell, declined, rose, increased) … Read more
Forget about the polar bears! Never mind the rainforests! Protect the apostrophe, it’s in danger! I was surprised to discover that there is an ‘Apostrophe Protection Society‘ in the UK. Even though it seems an unlikely idea for a whole website, it does have some easy to understand rules about apostrophe usage and an active … Read more
A student asked me the other day about paraphrasing. Her question was “Should the paraphrase be longer or shorter than the original text?” I would say that it is usual for the paraphrase to be shorter because the paraphrase is also a summary of the text. Students often get into difficulties paraphrasing because they don’t … Read more