One of my roles as the College of Online Education’s Student Writing Support Specialist is to help students understand what academic writing means, and how they can accomplish it.

Academic writing is an essential skill and one that involves clarity and power of expression. Writing specific and detail-oriented text, incorporating relevant sources, and maintaining a clear sense of audience, purpose, and genre are key elements to writing at a higher level.

I know this sounds a bit complicated, so let’s break it down! Here are eight things to keep in mind when writing:

As the Student Writing Specialist for JWU Online, professors often tell me that their students struggle with understanding assignment instructions.

Here’s how to tackle the sometimes frustrating process of following complex or lengthy directions.

1.       Read all assignment instructions carefully as soon as you receive them.

This will save you time and stress later on! If there is something you do not understand, be sure to reach out to your instructor as soon as you are able, as this is when his or her feedback will be most useful.

Earlier this week, I discussed how to identify and correct vague pronoun references in your writing. Now that we’ve explored that, let’s look at some of the most common vague pronoun errors I see in student writing:

1. Too many antecedents

A pronoun should have only one antecedent (noun) that is clear and unmistakable, as mentioned in the previous post.

As the writing specialist for Johnson & Wales University’s College of Online Education, it is my job to help students to improve their writing skills. Today, I bring you a common grammatical quandary—what to do with a singular indefinite pronoun.

Let’s review. A pronoun is a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase (e.g. I, you, he, they, it). An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun that does not refer to any person, amount, or thing in particular.

Here are a few examples of the most common singular indefinite pronouns: