Cranfield Libraries: Academic writing and plagiarism: Writing skills and style guides

Writing skills and style guides

Cranfield has produced its own suite of interactive online modules designed to enhance your research and writing skills. It explains how to project manage your research and write your thesis or other projects and is available on Blackboard: Cranfield research and writing skills for dissertations and projects.

We have also listed some other resources below that might help you develop your use of academic English.

Writing skills

Academic Phrasebank
Produced by the University of Manchester, this guide is designed primarily for non-native speakers of English. It provides a range of examples of academic English in a variety of contexts, including introductions, reporting the literature, critical evaluation, describing methods, reporting results, discussing findings, and writing conclusions.
How to write your best paper
This guide to writing an academic paper or thesis is particularly aimed at business student. Written by EconBiz, it covers the whole process from identifying a research question and literature searching, to referencing and editing.
Online Writing Lab
Free online advice from Purdue University on all aspects of academic writing, including creating a thesis statement, proofreading your work, technical paper writing, literary analysis and criticism, conducting research, and citations.
Using English for Academic Purposes
A suite of resources designed to help students with academic English. The section on writing is particularly helpful, but the site also provides help with speaking, presenting and note-taking.
Using tenses in scientific writing
When you write an experimental report, or draft a thesis chapter, you need to choose which tense, or tenses, to use. This flyer from the University of Melbourne makes you more conscious of what the choice of verb tense involves.

There are also two videos on Lynda.com that you might find useful:

Style guides

Cranfield University Editorial Style Guide
This guide is is primarily intended for use by Cranfield staff, but will be helpful for writing assignments and theses as well. It will help ensure your writing is consistent in matters such as capital letters, abbreviations, hyphens and naming conventions.
AskOxford.com
Part of the Oxford Dictionaries site, this section provides advice on English grammar, punctuation and spelling.
HyperGrammar
Produced by the University of Ottawa, this guide provides help with points of grammar as well as sentence and paragraph structure.
Notes on the rules and recommended style of technical writing in English
This guidance to best practice in writing a thesis has been written by Dr Eric Goodger, a Visiting Lecturer on Cranfield’s Thermal Power course.
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
This site is essentially an advertisement for the author's book and editing services, but does also provide useful examples of the correct use of punctuation and grammar.