There’s a lot of advice out there on the best way to write a cover letter, mostly focused on avoiding mistakes. Career-skill programs typically like to familiarize students with “killer lines” or genre-specific formalities, or with the dos and don’ts of language or layout. This often leads to the (faulty)…

This company offers to write your paper for you so that “you do not have the stress” of doing so. There is no mention that their product is against regulations of most universities/colleges. Indications are that students are increasingly turning to the so-called essay mills to write their scientific papers…

A job ad for a communications manager which shows up in the decoder as being male-biased.Do the texts in job vacancies impact whether men or women apply? An article in The Guardian argues that recent advertisements for headteacher posts show clear…

Editing your paper or article has to be done at different levels. Dawn Field wrote on the Oxford University Press (OUP) blog this week that there are four main stages.

Organisation is key success factorThe key success factor of a good text is good language. Right?Not necessarily so. Many texts I see, be they research papers, journal articles or theses, contain some pretty impressive vocabulary and have complex sentences which are mostly grammatically correct. However, often they do…