IS 214 : Needs and Usability Assessment Spring 2005, TuTh 2-3:30, 110 South Hall
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Writing Resources

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

The College Writing Programs 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.


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.

http://textant.colostate.edu/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

  • Frederick C. Crews, The Random House Handbook, 6th ed. Highly recommended.
  • Richard A. Lanham, Revising Prose (4th Edition)
  • Wilson Follett, Modern American Usage
  • H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage
  • William Strunk Jr and E.B. White, The Elements of Style.
    The 1918 version by Strunk is online, and very useful, but the improved edition co-authored by White is not online.
  • The Chicago Manual of Style. Now in its 14th ed. Regarding formatting references and other such issues of presentation:
  • The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage : The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World's Most Authoritative Newspaper by William G. Connolly, Allan M. Siegal.

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This page created by Nancy Van House.