Guides & Resources for Academic Writing

Please note!

This page is no longer accessible through the Library website menus. We have reordered our support pages, and these resources are now accessible on the Writing Skills, Research Skills and Avoiding Plagiarism pages.

However, we recognise that these guides may have been bookmarked by many and so we are leaving the link live, though the page itself is hidden unless you navigated here from a previous link. However, we advise you to visit the various skills topic pages as we will be updating these regularly.

There are many useful guides to help you get started with your academic writing. Often learners are under pressure for time and a well placed guide or short, interactive lesson at key points can save a lot of time in the longer term. We have a compiled a number that we recommend, which many students have provided very positive feedback on.

Manchester Academic Phrasebank

The Manchester Phrasebank is an excellent resource for all those looking to develop their academic writing at all levels, be they undergraduate, Masters level, or academic staff. It presents lists of phases broken down into areas such as “introducing a topic,” “being critical,” “comparing and contrasting,” “classifying and listing,” and much more. It will help you to articulate your research, by prompting critical analysis of your research.

Academic Writing Template

Many of our learners have found this template very useful, taken from the recommended book, They Say / I Say : The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff. It is a very useful guide to refer to when you are looking to articulate your research in an assignment.

It is a common problem for many, that despite having conducted a range of research into a topic, it is then difficult to demonstrate the level of understanding gained in a written essay.

This template helps to move away from merely listing research undertaken, and instead demonstrate critical analyses of sources, viewpoints, arguments and research.

They Say-I Say: Academic Worksheet Templates

Understanding referencing to avoid plagiarism

All Aboard Higher Education / Digital Learning: Interactive lesson on understanding referencing

This lesson from AllAboard.ie introduces using referencing standards to address the issue of avoiding plagiarism. It examines the distinctions between paraphrasing, quoting, citing and other ways of combining sources.

Literature Review & Search Strategies

All Aboard Higher Education / Conducting a search strategy:

This 30 min interactive lessons introduces search strategies, and discusses how you might define a topic. Its aim is to “equip you with the skills needed to manage the volume, velocity and variety of data while distilling and refining your custom search strategy.”

Zotero Referencing Software

Zotero – Supporting Research and Academic Writing

Zotero has many strengths that can support each stage of your research journey. It can act as a bookmarking tool for your initial research stage, you may also add notes to each record to allow you to retrace your research and to make connections between sources. In the written stages of your work it can help you with your academic referencing, providing an easy to use Word plug in for in-text citations. This can create automatic bibliographic records for the Griffith College Harvard referencing style.

The Library provides training guides and online videos to support you as you learn to incorporate Zotero into your academic work. We can also offer face to face support or remotely. Contact us to find out more.

To get started, visit our Zotero Referencing Software section

Playlist of Library Zotero tutorials on YouTube