Guides & Tutorials: University English: Academic Writing

Academic Writing

In this section, you will find resources to help you write an academic paper, including online tools to help you with word choice, phrasing, and a selection of handbooks from the Library.

Writing Help

Essay Writing Help
Student Writing

Essay Writing Help

Academic Skills for Independent Learners
- For and against (balanced) essays
- One-sided (argumentative) essays
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ICOSA Writing
- Argumentative essay writing
- Introduction to essay writing
- Thesis statement vs. topic sentence
Literacy in the Disciplines (LID)
- Argumentative essay genre guide
- Argumentative essay genre checklist
- Printable materials & interactive activities

PolyU -- Outstanding Work by Students (OWS)
A new collection of outstanding papers and projects by PolyU students.
HKBU -- HKBU Theses and Dissertations
HKBU Library provides access to all theses produced by research postgraduate students (i.e. MPhil and PhD) at HKBU, plus a selection of dissertations by students enrolled in taught postgraduate programs (MA, MFA, MCM, MSM, MHM, and DBA*).
HKU -- Student Projects
A collection of over 200 student projects, both individual and group projects.
HKU -- Undergraduate Theses
A collection of over 1000 undergraduate student theses.
LU -- Lingnan Theses and Dissertations
This series contains MPhil and PhD theses as approved by Lingnan University dating back to 1999. Unless otherwise stated, fulltext access is available for all theses.

Online Tools for Writing

Grammar

Free Grammar Checker (Online Editor)
No software installation is required. You get your results almost immediately. Just type the words you want to check into the text field and click one of the two buttons underneath to get started.
Grammarly
Compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s new AI-powered desktop Windows app.

Concordancers

"A concordancer is a piece of software, either installed on a computer or accessed through a website, which can be used to search, access and analyse language from a corpus. They...can give us very accurate information about the way language is authentically used." [Source]

Corpus Concordance English
This tool allows you to find evidence of appropriate English usage provided by a collection of corpora. Use this tool to answer questions such as, “Which prepositions are used with this word?” and, “Is this expression commonly used in writing?” Get corpus descriptions here.
Just the Word
Just the Word (JTW) is another tool that helps writers identify acceptable and commonly used collocations. Uses the British National Corpus. Learn more about JTW here.

Dictionaries and Thesauri

OneLook.com
An online search box to search across thousands of free online dictionaries, both general dictionaries and subject dictionaries.
Visual Thesaurus
The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that chart meanings and branch to related words.
Collins English Thesaurus

Phrasebanks

Academic Phrasebank
This online resource developed by the University of Manchester provides an extensive collection of phrases used to perform common functions in academic writing.

Handbooks from the Library

Handbooks

How to Start Writing

How to Start Writing

English Collocation

Professional English in Use

This series combines resources and exercises to help learners improve their English writing in professional contexts. Titles cover Medicine, Engineering, Marketing, Finance, Law, and more.