Academic Writing - Sentences - English Language Support

Tips and techniques

Whatever you are trying to learn, it’s useful to: (i) find good models to base your own language on

(ii) repeatedly practise producing your own original language

(iii) get feedback on the language you produce

Here are some suggestions about how you can ensure that you are constantly working on your sentence construction:

Exploit your environment! Living, studying and perhaps working in the UK means you are exposed to English all the time so be curious about the sentences you see and hear and constantly ask yourself how they are different from your own language.

Read, read, read! Set aside 20 minutes every day to read (absolutely anything!!) for the sole purpose of analysing how each sentence is constructed. This principle of ‘little but often’ really works!

Use an App! Use translation technology applications to test your ability to write an accurate sentence. Try to write a sentence without any help and only then use your app to check what it generates and compare this with your attempt. Again, use the little but often principle.

Reference books are our friends! Use a good grammar reference book (see recommended books) for extra practice in the areas you struggle with.

Practice with a friend! Organise your own English study groups with friends to provide greater motivation.

Use the University! Make full use of the excellent language learning support the university offers to answer any questions you need professional help with.

Recommended books in the library

There are no specifically relevant books on English sentence structure (more correctly known as ‘syntax’) but you will find a standard grammar book very useful, such as:

https://go.exlibris.link/BrjTk851

The book below*, although not in the library, is widely available and an excellent resource for anyone who is serious about consolidating and extending their ability to use increasingly complex grammar to communicate academic ideas:

*English for Academic Study: Grammar for Writing, by Anne Vicary, published by Garnet Education

ISBN 978-1-78260-070-1

(*Please ask if you would like to see a tutor’s personal copy before buying)

ISBN: ISBN 978-1-78260-070-1
English for Academic Study: Grammar for Writing by Anne Vicary
ISBN: 9781782600701
Publication Date: 2014-03-27
English for Academic Study: Grammar for Writing English for Academic Study: Grammar for Writing is a graded self-study course that will help students improve their academic writing. It will build their confidence in understanding and using grammar for written assignments, so they can write accurate English and communicate more effectively in academic contexts. EAS: Grammar for Writing starts at a relatively low level, recognizing that many students require continuing practice of common grammatical problems in academic writing (such as subject-verb agreement, or the use of present simple and present continuous). It gradually increases the level of challenge so that by the end of the book students can use appropriate grammatical structures to express more complex academic ideas. The nine units are based on the following topics: Starting out Information flow within a text Looking back (past simple and present perfect) Showing logical links (1) Showing logical links (2) Expressing shades of meaning Expressing condition Avoiding person-based writing Using relative clauses Each unit is divided into three stages, moving from basic structures to more complex ones. Full explanations and examples are followed by extensive practice exercises. Many exercises use examples from student essays, so students can identify typical problems and work out how to put them right. Each unit also includes an end-of-unit self-check test to give students a quick overview of what they have covered. There are four useful appendices on: articles, describing data, referring to academic sources, and a sample student essay. A full answer key is available here. The dedicated EAS website also provides additional resources across the range of titles in the series. This book can be used in conjunction with the following books in the English for Academic Studies (EAS) series, also published by Garnet Education: EAS: Reading, EAS: Writing, EAS: Extended Writing & Research Skills, EAS: Listening, EAS: Speaking, EAS: Vocabulary and EAS: Pronunciation

Recommended websites

As with all resources, you need to make sure that they are reliable and trustworthy. To a certain extent, it’s a question of what works for you and you may well have your own favourites (and please share these!) but here are a couple of good ones to start with.

For those of you who prefer the audio-visual approach, this is a clear guide to English sentence structure. Click here to watch

If you find this useful, why not watch other videos in the same series?

EAP resource bank (eapfoundation.com)

As it says, this is a bank of resources so provides links to a huge number of relevant sites dealing with all aspects of English language learning, not just sentence structure/grammar.

Languages for All

Click here to start.

English Language Support: Academic Writing - Sentences