I have been working with students to improve their academics for many years. I work with many students who have not received assistance in school to write at a level that is necessary for graduating high school. I provide resources to assist a student to learn how to approach writing tasks including writing essays for tests or homework assignments. I also provide additional resources for assignments that require research with an exercise to practice research skills. These resources will help students learn about structures when they are lost and frustrated about how to proceed with their writing.

These skills are necessary for school, jobs, and college.  Everyone needs to be able to construct good paragraph, organize thoughts to produce short or long essays and a way to produce essays quickly for exams and extemporaneous writing tasks at work such as an incident report or a new process that your team must follow.  If you need to think about how to do these things, your grades will suffer and you may miss out on opportunities.

Here are additional resources:

MLA Style: English And Other Humanities

In English classes and some humanities classes, you will be asked to use the Modern Language Association (MLA) system for documenting sources, which is set forth in the MLA Handbook / Association of America, Modern Language, 8th ed. (New York: MLA, 2016). MLA recommends in-text citations that refer readers to a list of works cited.

APA Style: The Social Sciences

In most social science classes, you will be asked to use the American Psychological Association (APA) system for documenting sources, which is set forth in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed. (Washington, D.C.: APA, 2020). APA recommends in-text citations that refer readers to a list of references.

Chicago Documentation Style

Professors in history and some humanities courses often require footnotes or endnotes based on The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017). When you use Chicago style notes, you will usually be asked to include a bibliography at the end of your paper.

ASA Style

Compiled by the American Sociological Association (ASA), the ASA highlights and features guidelines for the most common situations encountered by authors and editors in the ASA journal publication process. It is designed to serve as the authoritative reference for writing, submitting, editing, and copy editing manuscripts for the ASA journals. In practice, however, the ASA  also serves a wider community of researchers, writers, and publishers who use it to prepare and present scholarly papers in other sociological and social science venues.

AMA Style

The American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors is a style guide written by the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Archives Journals. It identifies the writing and citation styles used worldwide in scholarly publications for medicine. The AMA Manual of Style is a crucial guide for everyone involved in medical and scientific writing. It is broadly used and accepted as standard, not only by AMA publications but also by numerous other scientific textbooks, journals, and academia.

AP Stylebook

The Associated Press Stylebook (New York: AP, 2020) is the definitive resource for journalists and writers in other professions. The Stylebook outlines basic rules on grammar, punctuation, usage, and journalistic style, but it also reflects changes in common language, offers guidance on media law, explains the AP’s news values and principles, and helps to navigate the ever-changing world of social media.

Merriam-Webster Online

Merriam-Webster provides a free online dictionary with audio pronunciations, a thesaurus, Word of the Day, word games, and other English language resources.

Improving your essay

Learning to Research

Study Habits / Notetaking

Writing Exercises