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Writing Guide

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Preface

This guide is designed to help you become a professional-level writer, accurate and fluent in your writing of English. It's also designed to help you write excellent course work essays. For all English-related degrees it's important to become a professional-level writer. This is someone who writes English that is accurate in terms of spelling, grammar and syntax, whose work is well styled, correctly referenced where appropriate, and whose prose has a certain life and energy. We would like you to leave the University able to write confidently in many contexts, whether for a book, website, newspaper article, advert or letter of application. This is not something that can be learned quickly. The following sections will introduce you to a range of points—take them on board in the first six months of your degree. The three most definitive works of styling and form are:

(in the United Kingdom) Robert Ritter (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). ISBN: 0-19-869175-0.
(in the USA) The Chicago Manual of Style: for authors, editors and copywriters (15th ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). ISBN: 0-226-10403-6.
Robert Ritter (ed.), New Hart's Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors (1st ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ISBN: 0-19-861041-6.

The links below will take you to the other sections of the Writing Guide. If you prefer, there is a downloadable version of the whole Guide (a PDF file of 78 KB) which is more convenient for printing. Please see our PDF FAQ page if you are unfamiliar with PDF format.