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Books on Writing
General Guides to Writing
Style Manuals
Guides to Writing in Specific Fields
Dictionaries and Thesauruses
Grammar
Resumes, CVs, and Cover Letters

Avoiding Plagiarism

Books on Writing

General Guides to Writing

If you can only afford one book, we recommend The Craft of Research. If you can afford two books, get this and The New Oxford Guide to Writing. Both are inexpensive paperbacks useful for people at all levels but targeted to advanced writers.

Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research, Third Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
This is probably the best book available on how to research, plan, and write a graduate-level (or advanced undergraduate) research paper, thesis, or dissertation. There is an entire section on how to construct an argument, called “making a claim and supporting it,” which is very useful for anyone writing a paper for a college or university course.

Thomas Kane, The New Oxford Guide to Writing (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994)
This is an excellent guide to writing style: how to craft an effective sentence, paragraph, and essay when writing non-fiction prose.

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence (New York: Harper Collins, 2011). A good supplement to The New Oxford Guide to Writing, this book discusses in detail the different kinds of sentences and considerations of style in writing an effective sentence — which is the basic unit of thought.

Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, Sixth Edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991)
Basically written for students in freshman English courses, this is a useful elementary guide for undergraduates that covers all aspects of the writing process (such as how to distinguish a topic from a thesis statement, how to construct an outline, and many other topics).
Various earlier editions exist which may be found inexpensively in used copies on amazon.com.

William Strunk and E.B. White, Elements of Style, Fourth Edition (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2000)
A classic, this is a very concise guide to writing simply and clearly. Available in various editions.

See also, under Guides to Writing in Specific Fields:

A.P. Martinich, Philosophical Writing: An Introduction

T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Argumentation

Style Manuals

MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, Third Edition (New York: Modern Language Association of American, 2008)
Used generally in the humanities (such as English, Foreign Languages and Comparative Literature, History, Philosophy, Art History, Classics, Religious Studies, Music, Theater, Dance, and Film Studies). In addition to containing comprehensive information on how to format citations and bibliographies, it contains some general tips on the research and writing process.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2009)
Used generally in quantitative social science. In addition to containing comprehensive information on how to format citations and bibliographies, it contains general tips on the research and writing process specific to quantitative empirical studies. For qualitative and historical social science studies, see The Craft of Research for tips on the research and writing process.

Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)
This comprehensive manual with numbered paragraphs, well-indexed and available both in print and by subscription on line, is the editor’s bible, and it is authoritative for all issues not covered by style guides specific to a set of disciplines such as the MLA and APA.

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, Nineteenth Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law Review, 2010).
This is the guide to the formatting of legal citations. Law reviews in the US follow the Bluebook, but publishing in other fields also tends to defer to the Bluebook on legal citations.
Legal formatting is complicated. If you have a law review paper we are editing, you may wish to save money by learning how to do it yourself, or to save time by having us do it, because we have editors who know the Bluebook.

Guides to Writing in Specific Fields

(Recommended for students in all academic fields:)
A.P. Martinich, Philosophical Writing: An Introduction (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005)
Of the numerous guides available to thinking out and writing a philosophy paper, this book, written by a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas-Austin, is the best we have found. Its usefulness extends beyond the field of philosophy, just because the skills used in writing a philosophy paper apply broadly to most papers in both the sciences and humanities.

Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain, A Short Guide to Writing about Literature, Twelfth Edition(New York: Pearson Longman, 2011)
Covers all aspects of the writing process and provides a useful guide to the different types of literature and common elements of literary criticism.

Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing about Art, Tenth Edition (New York: Pearson Longman, 2010)
Same as A Short Guide to Writing about Literature, but geared for writing about art.

Timothy J. Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing about Film, Seventh Edition (New York: Pearson Longman, 2009)
Same as A Short Guide to Writing about Literature, but geared for writing about film.

Other books in this series: The Short Guide to Writing about . . . series also includes: History, Science, Social Science, Psychology, Law, Music, Biology, Chemistry, and Criminal Justice. It’s an excellent series. These are all elementary guides geared to the person learning to write in this field, but like most elementary guides they are also handy references.

Bernard F. Dick, Anatomy of Film, Sixth Edition (New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2009).
A useful guide for students analyzing film. Covers the different elements of film in a bit more detail than A Short Guide to Writing about Film.

T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Argumentation, Sixth Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008)
Very useful for philosophy students, and anyone studying for the LSAT, but also of general value to anyone who has to construct an argument, which is everyone writing an academic paper. A chapter on the elements of a good argument is followed by detailed discussion of 60 argumentative fallacies, more than we were able to find in standard texts on logic.

Dictionaries and Thesauruses

Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Available online by subscription, this is the authoritative unabridged dictionary of the English language (an unabridged dictionary theoretically contains all the meanings of all the words in the language; however, there are many scientific and technical terms that are not in the OED and that it is best to search for online).

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Our favorite everyday dictionary. Excellent, clear, and straightforward definitions.

Barbara Ann Kipfer, Roget’s International Thesaurus, Seventh Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 2001)
There are many thesauruses available. A good thesaurus is an invaluable aid to writing when you are searching for the right word or for different words in order to avoid repetition or in order to find a word that conveys the relevant meaning more precisely than a more general “base” word. However, a thesaurus should be used only with a dictionary: since no synonym (a word with the same meaning) is an exact synonym, it is absolutely necessary that you know the precise meaning of the word you are using.

Grammar

Betty Schrampfer Azar, Fundamentals of English Grammar, Third Edition (New York: Pearson, 2002)
Designed as a textbook for adults learning English as a foreign language, this book contains very handy and clear one-page summaries of various points of grammar in table format.

Resumes, CVs, and Cover Letters

Kate Wendleton, Packaging Yourself: The Targeted Resume (New York: The Five O’Clock Club, 2005)
Wendleton has a set of books on the job search process, possibly the best books on the market. She shows you not just how to write a good resume, but more importantly how to compile the information that goes into it.

Richard H. Beatty, The Perfect Cover Letter (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2004)
This is a very useful guide to the elements of an effective cover letter.

Avoiding Plagiarism: What Every Student Writer Must Know

We provide a legitimate service: we edit papers, we won’t write them for you. Before engaging our services, it is important that you read and understand our Plagiarism Policy. For more about Plagiarism and how to avoid it, see below.

Plagiarism Policy

Academic English Editing™ adheres to the highest ethical standards, and we will not in any way assist any act of plagiarism (see description below as to what constitutes plagiarism). In addition, we will not research or write any part of your paper for you, although we may, within reasonable limits that respect your authorship, suggest certain reorganizations, rewrite sentences or phrases, suggest an alternate word choice, or make other suggestions, which may be stylistic, conceptual, or both. Your paper is just that, your paper. You are fully and solely responsible for the contents of the final text, including all editorial changes and suggestions from us that you accept. Academic English Editing™ assumes no responsibility and is not liable if you present work as your own that was written by or copied directly from someone else; or if we suggest ideas that you borrow without attribution (it is easy, and perfectly legitimate, to acknowledge assistance from an editor or an idea that was derived from someone else); or if you make inadvertent errors in documentation that we do not catch and correct.

What Every Student Writer Must Avoid at All Costs

It is important for every writer to know how to avoid plagiarism, which can be defined as academic dishonesty or the appearance thereof, usually committed as a result of carelessness in not properly using and crediting source material. As Wayne Booth, et al. observe in The Craft of Research, “few researchers intentionally plagiarize,” and “most writers who plagiarize inadvertently do so because they took notes carelessly” (201). Plagiarism can have very serious consequences, and it is something you definitely don’t ever want to be found guilty of, especially since whether you intended to cheat or not may very well not be the issue.

What is Plagiarism?

The MLA (Modern Language Association) Style Manual defines plagiarism as “using another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source….Forms of plagiarism include the failure to give appropriate acknowledgement when repeating another’s wording or particularly apt phrase, paraphrasing another’s argument, and presenting another’s line of thinking.” The simple rule for avoiding plagiarism is to document sources. “You may certainly use other persons’ words and thoughts, but the borrowed material must not appear to be your own creation” (MLA, 2008, 165-66). This means you must indicate what you borrowed and where from. This is the purpose of footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical citations —whichever form you chose, or are required, to use.

Why is Plagiarism a Problem?

Most people who commit plagiarism are not dishonest, and are not trying to cheat; they are merely careless in either their research or writing. This is why it is so important to document sources correctly with footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical citations.
In many countries there is a different culture of borrowing, and copying without attribution is considered a legitimate scholarly activity; not so in, for example, the United States, where plagiarism is considered a very serious offense.
A third group of people who commit plagiarism consists of students who have been led to believe that the most important thing in their education is getting the best possible grade. This is a mistake many honest students make, and it is also the reason why some people cheat. Our advice is:

It is not worth the risk. The problem with cheating in order to get a better grade is first of all it is way too risky — deliberate plagiarism can be easy to spot and if you are caught you are likely both to get an “F” and to be subject to campus disciplinary proceedings, which may well lead to being kicked out of school.

Don’t be grade conscious. It undermines learning, takes away the fun, makes you anxious and thus less effective as a thinker and writer, and by taking you away from asking more interesting questions, it paradoxically tends to result in lower grades.

Writing is thinking, and writing a paper for a college or university course is a good opportunity to exercise and develop your capacity for original thought. At Academic English Editing™ we can help you by pointing out to you which parts of your argument are more effective and which less so, and what can be improved conceptually as well as stylistically. That’s why we are much more than just grammar-checkers or proofreaders (which means many of the people advertising themselves as “editors”), who only catch the most basic errors.

Tips on How to Avoid Inadvertent Plagiarism

Avoiding plagiarism involves more than just the recognition that you must document every phrase and every idea that comes from someone else. It also requires knowing how to research and how to use to use texts. For students and scholars desiring more information about how to avoid inadvertent plagiarism, the best discussion available maybe that in Wayne Booth et al., The Craft of Research (Booth, 2003, 201-204). Following are some tips gleaned from these pages in this excellent book, which every scholar should have:

Always “play it safe and credit the original as fully as possible” (204).
When you are taking notes while researching, immediately put in quotation marks everything that is taken word-for-word from a source, and
Immediately write down, along with your notes, the source for everything you read.
Don’t just borrow an author’s ideas and change the words, unless of course you credit the source.
Don’t paraphrase too closely. A key test is whether or not with regard to the words in the paraphrase, “a careful reader can see that the writer could have written them only while simultaneously reading the original” (204). If you are trying to summarize or paraphrase a passage from a text, it is best to read it carefully, take notes in your own words about what the passage is saying, and then put the text aside and summarize or paraphrase it from memory.

Academic English Editing™ can help because many inadvertent errors that entail plagiarism can be caught, and our job is to catch the mistakes you do make (and that every writer makes) while also helping you to polish your paper and make it not only grammatically flawless but also conceptually solid and stylistically engaging. We also make suggested changes and comments that are presented in such a way that you can learn from them. Students and scholars who work with us do get better results, and they also develop more as writers in the long run.

Sources

Booth, Wayne, Gregory C. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, Third Edition (New York: Modern Language Association of American, 2008).