Essay writing toolkit – Reference books

While you are writing essays it is useful to have some reference books to hand.  Although there is a great deal of material online to help with general reference queries, websites are not always reliable.  It pays to have some decent reference books.  Some of these will be available to borrow from the local library [...]

Custom essays: assessing essay writing services

There are a lot of students under pressure to finish end of year essay assignments at the moment.  Maybe you are trying to write essays – you might even have two or three essays to deal with at once – or maybe you are writing a custom dissertation.  When time is short, you may consider [...]

Essay writing format: paraphrase and summary

As you write essays you will need to paraphrase or summarize the work of others.  How can you do this effectively and what are the likely errors when trying to use this vital essay writing skill?  Paraphrasing is not as straight forward as it appears.

Cambridge Essays: an essay writing prize

There’s still time for Year 12 or Lower Sixth students to enter the Robson History Prize 2010 with a First Prize of £600 (split between the winner and their school) and a £400 Second Prize (also split between the winner and their school).  To enter this essay writing competition, students should submit an essay of [...]

Punctuation rules: using commas, apostrophes and quotation marks correctly

As an editor, I see the same simple punctuation mistakes time and again costing students valuable marks when the overall quality of their work deserves a much higher grade. Whether it is everyday essay writing or an undergraduate dissertation, correct grammar punctuation is the quickest way to see a huge improvement in the quality of your [...]