If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot. There is no way around these two things that I am aware of, no shortcut…If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time to write. Simple as that”(pp. 145-147)
I have already shared a wide variety of resources geared especially towards helping graduate students and student research enhance their academic writing including research methodology textbooks and academic writing guides. In this post I am adding two more resources:
1- Thesis Whisperer Verb Cheat Sheet
Verbs are judgmental. The verb you use to describe someone else’s work indicates your feeling about the quality of the work. For instance, “Mewburn (2010) argues…” is kinder than “Mewburn (2010) asserts…” (a scholar who asserts is not really a scholar at all). Choose your feeling, and then pick a verb from the list that fits your sentence. Or just scan the list for best fit. This is the list I made to put on my own wall – you may disagree with my categories. Feel free to change it to suit your style.
Click on this link to access, download and print the original cheat sheet.
2- 70 Useful Sentences for Academic Writings
This is a wonderful compilation of some useful academic sentences to help you in your academic writing assignments. This hard work has been done by Luiz and shared on his website. I highly recommend Luiz’s list for any student researcher
Here is what Luiz said about this list :
Back in the late 90s, in the process of reading for my MA dissertation, I put together a collection of hundreds of sentence stems that I felt could help me with my academic writing later on. And they did. Immensely. After the course was over, I stacked my sentences away, but kept wondering if I could ever put them to good use and perhaps help other DELTA / Trinity / MA / PhD students who know exactly what they want to say, but might have trouble finding the best way to say it.
Check out the entire list from this Link.
