4 - Academic Writing - Literature - Guides & Tutorials at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Academic Writing

In this section, you will find resources to help you write your paper. In "Online Tools for Writing", I include links to concordances, dictionaries, thesauri and phrasebanks. In "Library Resources", I highlight a few useful handbooks from the Library to help with your academic writing.

Browsing Online Tools for Writing

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

Oxford English Dictionary Online [PolyU login required]
The authoritative historical dictionary of English that contains the history of individual words, traced through millions of quotations of literature in English. Also contains present-day meanings.
OneLook.com
An online search box to search across thousands of free online dictionaries, both general dictionaries and subject dictionaries.
Visual Thesaurus [PolyU login required]
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.

Browsing Library Handbooks

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.