Welcome back! Fall 2013 Edition

jjpacres / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Welcome back students (or just welcome, if you're a new MALS or ASGC student)! Now that you've survived your first week of classes, perhaps you've had time to look through those course syllabi and start getting an idea of all the different types of writing you'll be doing this semester. Once your head has stopped spinning at the thought of all that reading and writing (you can do it!!), check out the following links to help you get your semester of academic writing off to a great start.

MALS Online Writing Assistance
The MALS Writing Center has lots of online assistance available to help you with the writing process. Besides calling on your trusty writing consultant, don't forget to check out www.malswritingcenter.info for information on specific types of graduate-level writing, to Turabian style tips, to what to make of your professor's comments on your papers.

Writing Strategies
These posts from the blog Explorations of Style feature the author's "five key strategies for improving academic writing," which I think are a great to place to start, or just review, your academic writing habits: Reverse Outlines, Paragraphs, Transitions, Verbs, and Subjects.

Make Yourself Clear
Clear writing can be difficult to achieve, especially if you're new to graduate-level writing and all the concepts and ideas you'll need to communicate in your papers. Learn how to be concise in this handout from UNC's Writing Center, and read my thoughts on the topic in this previous blog post on sentence clarity.

Mini Resource Roundup: Writing Tips

I really enjoy reading the blog Explorations of Style, by Rachael Cayley, for all of the author's wonderful insights on writing. Because she works with graduate student writers, the topics she tackles in her blog often tie directly to the types of writing conundrums MALS students face. Which is why I've decided to share three of her recent posts here today!

Voice
I think most of us are familiar with voice in literature—if you have a favorite novelist, you could probably identify a sample of his or her writing without a name attached because it just sounds like that author. Many graduate student writers struggle with making their own voices heard among all the research they're citing as evidence. Check out this Explorations of Style post to learn about how to include your own voice in your academic writing.

Parallelism
Most of us have seen this marked on our papers at one time or another. This can be a tricky mistake to spot and fix in your own writing, but parallel structure in lists is so important for clarity. Here, Cayley offers three ways to fix a rather complex sentence that lacks parallel construction.

But of course!
In this post, Cayley illustrates how using phrases like "of course" can clarify your writing, but she also offers alternatives for when saying "of course" might make you sound rather, ahem, too sure of yourself.