Writing

Writing can be a difficult task if you don't know where to begin. I've put together some information to help my students and other ESL students to use critical thinking skills to create useful writing examples that will help them develop their over all writing skills (no matter what language you are writing in!)

Things to keep in mind:

• Your target audience. This means that you need to ask yourself "who am I writing for". Are you writing an academic essay, an answer to a test question, a letter to an exchange program, an email to friend?
• Use complete sentence structure.  Make sure you have a subject (noun) and an action (verb) and that your sentence is starts with a capital letter.
• Use all the resources at hand. Use spell check in Word to make sure you are spelling correctly! Use the Internet to find examples of writing that is helpful to you.
• What ever you do, DON'T plagiarize! Plagiarism is not acceptable and you will receive a zero mark from me if you do! If you want to use information from a website, article, etc. you must cite the author or website.

Useful links for writing

Comparison and contrast essays tips

Here is a very straightforward, easy to understand explanation of what comparing and contrasting means in an academic writing assignment

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/comparcontrast.html

Definition essay

You might be asked to give a definition of a word, term or concept. Here are some tips on how to do that.

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/definition.html

Writing Resources

Here is a really helpful site for finding information on writing all different kinds of essays, papers and writing activities

http://www.ipl.org/div/aplus/linkscommon.htm#comparison