 | |||||
Welcome to the Guide to Writing Correctly.INTRODUCTIONThe Guide has been designed to support your progress in University of Aberdeen courses. Its aim is to help you to become a more skilful and effective writer.Whether you are already a confident writer or one of the many students who are aware their writing skills handicap them in giving expression to their ideas and in doing justice to the quality of their thinking, time spent checking that you have mastered the writing skills covered by the Guide is likely to be time well spent. Written language, as a tool for communication that has been developed over countless centuries, is a shared and rich inheritance. But if we are each to try to maximise the benefits from that legacy, we will need to devote periods of time when we give concentrated attention to our writing skills. The Guide is ambitious and challenging in the way it attempts to be concise but instructive. By working through the various self-test opportunities provided, you will engage in an active learning process. The Guide has no pretensions to being a last word; it is offered as a springboard to further progress. Users may come to it with little in the way of familiarity with the terms and concepts of grammar. They can be assured that the Guide has been designed to give priority to their needs. If the Guide succeeds in its aims, such users will leave it with a capacity for basic grammatical analysis that is sufficient for proceeding to considerably more advanced study of language. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe Guide has been developed in this interactive Web-based form by Dr Melvin Dalgarno, Director of Wider Access Policy in the University of Aberdeen, with the invaluable support of colleagues in the University's Learning Technology Unit.The work has been supported by a Wider Access grant for Part-Time Course Development from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. It is part of a package of support provision in a joint project involving the University of Aberdeen, Banff and Buchan College, and Aberdeen College in opening up part-time, highly flexible and articulated routes from HNC and HND programmes to an MA in Entrepreneurship. The Web-based Guide is based on a booklet, Guide to Written Work, which the Department of English in the University of Aberdeen published for the use of its students. The permission of the Department of English to allow parts of their Guide to be adapted and developed to support on-line students is acknowledged with gratitude. Particular thanks are due to Gert Ronberg in that department for his characteristic generosity. This Web-based Guide to Writing Correctly is utterly reliant on his intellectual property. WORKING WITH THE GUIDEThe various sections of the Guide can be studied in any order. Dip in wherever you like, since you are in control of your own learning. Click on any of the Section Buttons to get started. |