IS204

Resources for writers -- a few suggestions

SIMS

By Pam Samuelson: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.html. While it was drafted with teaching legal writing in mind, it has some helpful writing hints that SIMS students may benefit from.

Berkeley Campus

College Writing Programs offers undergraduate and graduate courses, public programs, and resources to promote writing and the teaching of writing across the UC Berkeley campus. The website offers information about the College Writing Programs, about resources for writing and writing instruction on the Berkeley campus (Writing on Campus), as well as on the worldwide web (More Writing Resources).

One interesting resource that they link to is Purdue's Online Writing Lab which has many links to useful resources, including resources for English as a second language students that may be useful for non-native speakers of English.

added 9/5/02

Online Resources

WWW.BARTLEBY.COM/usage  Its claim: "Bartleby.com combines contemporary and classic usage guides to form the best full-text searchable resource on the web."  It's probably right.  The downside is that you need to know the term for what you're looking for; if you know what a "dangling participle" is, you probably know not to use one.  However, once you're in the site you can, for example, find when and how to use a specific word (and common misuses) by searching  the word index of the American Heritage Dictionary.

http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/links.html: Jack Lynch, an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, maintains this clear and direct online Guide to Grammar and Style. 

WWW.ENGL.NIU.EDU/DHARDY/GRAMMARBOOK/TITLE.HTML:  Don Hardy's  Traditional Grammar: An Interactive Book is a complete and free introduction to the basic syntactic structure of Modern English and the most common prescriptive errors in formal writing and how to avoid them. Approximately the first half of the book is devoted to syntactic structure. The remainder of the book is devoted to prescriptive errors and how to avoid them.  A reader can use the table of contents to find moderately-specific topics.

Merriam-Webster: WWW.M-W.COM  Not only online dictionary, but word games.

Roget's Interactive Thesaurus at http://thesaurus.reference.com/

Most of these links came from an article in the SF Chronicle, 11/12/01:
ONLINE GUIDE/Writers' Resources/Look online when you want to write just the right word
John Batteiger, Chronicle Staff Writer
 

Books

Proofreaders' marks
 

This page last updated 11/14/03 but not all links checked. Let me know if you find dead links.
Prof. Nancy Van House, SIMS, UC Berkeley