Effective Writing: A Guide for Social Science Students

This book offers basic guidelines on writing effectively for academic purposes. It reminds students that writing is an integral part of the learning process, and shows them how to write clear sentences, coherent paragraphs, and well-organized papers. It explains in detail matters of style and format, including how to quote, cite, and list reference sources (using both APA and ASA styles), and how to present quantitative and qualitative research results. Students can also learn how to revise, edit, and proofread to produce a high-quality paper. While this guide is prepared for the use of both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences, it contains a great deal of useful material that can help students studying other disciplines to write better academic papers.

To make the book more helpful, topics such as subject-verb agreement, the use of articles, verb tenses, and punctuation are included in the appendices. Also included are detailed comments on revision of faulty sentences taken from student writing and an extensive appendix on the use of over 300 selected words and phrases with explanatory notes and example sentences.

This book offers basic guidelines on writing effectively for academic purposes. It reminds students that writing is an integral part of the learning process, and shows them how to write clear sentences, coherent paragraphs, and well-organized papers.

Pedro Pak-tao Ng was a visiting scholar at Clare Hall of the University of Cambridge as a recipient of the Leverhulme Fellowship and for more than thirty years he has been on the faculty of the Department of Sociology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He contributed to the compilation of the first and revised editions of A Glossary of Sociological Terms.