Useful Links for Writing and English Skills

Whether you need to brush up your English before a writing assignment, want tips on how to

create an effective introduction to your thesis, or find out more about how to quote or give

references properly, there are many excellent websites that can be of help. Here we have

picked out some of the more useful ones that we often recommend to students, with lots of

explanations, quizzes, video lessons, and exercises to explore.

Academic Writing

The University of Toronto has a well-structured and informative website on how to plan and

structure an essay. Check out ‘Using Sources’ for information on how to use references in the

correct way, and how to avoid plagiarism. Under ‘English as a Second Language’ you can

also find help to master common grammatical stumbling blocks.

http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/planning-and-organizing

Eslbee.com is the website of an online course in academic writing for non-native speakers of

English. Here you can find helpful explanations and quizzes on both writing skills and

grammar, as well as recordings where the teacher explains grammatical rules.

http://eslbee.com/

The Roane State College Online Writing Lab offers accessible and concise advice on writing

and grammar.

http://www.roanestate.edu/owl/

Learning English

At the Free English Video Lessons site you can find hundreds of useful video lessons on

grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, writing skills etc. and there are also some quizzes where

you can practice what you have learnt. Highly recommended!

http://www.engvid.com/

The BBC Learning English site offers opportunities to practice your English by listening to

audio and video clips with for instance a weekly soap opera and simplified news stories.

There are also discussion groups and quizzes on grammar and vocabulary.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/

The British Council has a website with lots of interactive games, multimedia exercises and

stories.

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/

This non-commercial site provides information on both grammar and writing, and has a great

many interactive quizzes, word games, proverbs, a random-sentence generator and other study

materials where you can practice for instance prepositions, verb tenses, or article usage.

http://www.manythings.org/

Dictionaries

Longman English Dictionary

http://www.ldoceonline.com/

Macmillan Dictionary

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Heinle's Newbury House Dictionary of American English

http://nhd.heinle.com/home.aspx

Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com

http://thesaurus.com/

http://dictionary.reference.com/

Norstedts Swedish-English/English-Swedish Dictionary

http://www.ord.se/

Pronunciation

Do you want to practice speaking English with the help of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?

At the English Central website you can improve your English pronunciation by repeating

sections from video clips of famous speeches. The site uses speech recognition to provide

instant feedback and advice. There are also lots of educational video clips that can be used to

practice talking at meetings or during job interviews.

http://www.englishcentral.com/

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If you want to improve your English, make it a habit to visit some of those websites a couple

of times each week; watch lessons, and do quizzes and exercises. If you also pick up a novel

in English to read every once in a while (you can find a list of our book recommendations

below), you will soon notice that writing and reading in English becomes much easier!

(As all of these websites are external, we are not responsible for the material being updated or

available. You are more than welcome, though, to contact us if there is a problem with any of

the sites, so that we can consider removing it from our list.)

Book Recommendations from the English Language Tutors!

Do you read advanced text books in English for your studies, but never a novel? A

sophisticated terminology is not enough if you are going to write a thesis or paper; you will

also need a firm grasp of basic vocabulary and grammar. Reading good books is probably the

most efficient way of mastering a second language, and reading something you enjoy makes it

a lot easier to learn. Here we have compiled a list of books that we recommend to students,

and we hope you will find something that interests you. The books are organized according to

genre, and titles in bold are particularly easy to read, but all the books have been chosen

because they are both entertaining and written in an accessible language and style.

The Classics

Rudyard Kipling. The Jungle Book

Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland

Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House on the Prairie series

Richard Adams. Watership Down

Roald Dahl. The Witches, Matilda, The Twits etc

Jane Austen. Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey etc.

Charles Dickens. David Copperfield, The Adventures of Oliver Twist etc

Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird

George Orwell. Animal Farm

Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises

Toni Morrison. Sula

Fantasy novels and series

C.S. Lewis. The Narnia series

J. K. Rowling. The Harry Potter series

John Lenahan. Shadowmagic

Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Ursula K LeGuin: The Word for World is Forest and The Earthsea Series

Margaret Atwood. The Robber Bride

Science Fiction

Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ray Bradbury. The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man

Isaac Asimov. The Foundation series, the Galactic Empire series, I, Robot etc

Isabel Allende. The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts etc

Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game

Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle

Crime Fiction

Arthur Conan Doyle. A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventures

of Sherlock Holmes

Agatha Christie. Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Five Little Pigs, The

Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Alexander McCall Smith. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency-series.

P. D. James. Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, Unnatural Causes etc

Raymond Chandler. Farewell My Lovely, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye

Humor

Helen Fielding. Bridget Jones’s Diary

Nick Hornby. About a Boy, High Fidelity, Fever Pitch

Sue Townsend. The Queen and I; Rebuilding Coventry

Marian Keyes. Watermelon etc