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

Acknowledgements

Compiled by English Language Librarian, Christine Ho, and Research Support Librarian, Aster Zhao, and includes resources shared by Language Instructor Linda Lin in her presentation on academic writing tools.

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.

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.
Springer Exemplar
SpringerExemplar searches more than 3,500 journals and close to 200,000 books from Springer’s collection to find authentic examples of how a word or phrase is used in published literature. Learn more 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.

Library Resources

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.