The Writers Diet And Paper

As a first year student who has not studied for 20 years I understand my lack of knowledge and experience in academic writing is because my reading, writing and spelling abilities are based on the osmosis of learning these skills without necessarily understanding the rules (Anderson, et al, 2016 p7). Unsurprisingly, upon analysing feedback from the proofreading websites ‘The Writers Diet’ and ‘PaperRater’, I discovered a number of issues within each principle which affects my ability to be efficient in academic writing. I recorded these findings in the table provided to highlight my strengths and weaknesses and to help assist in the organisation and development to improve my academic writing skills. I can tackle the concern of flabby writing highlighted in ‘The Writers Diet’ by reducing the amount of verbs, nouns and pronouns and, replacing a passive voice with an active voice to create simple structured sentences which emphasises the active source rather than the action itself

Formal means ‘official’ therefore writing in the first person (except for reflective writing), the use of slang, abbreviations, contractions are to be avoided (Grellier & Goerke, 2014 p 178). Spelling is a strength highlighted by ‘The PaperRater’ and I believe my strength is based upon my phonologic and phonemic awareness, applying spelling rules such as ‘When ‘e’ goes away, ‘ing’ comes to stay’ and UK spelling rules where ‘s’ is used instead of ‘z’ in words like personalise (McDevitt et al, 2013 p 397). With words I am unsure of spelling I will continue to consult a dictionary and broaden my spelling bank by introducing new words and synonyms into my writing with the use of a thesaurus (Grellier & Goerke, 2014 p 198). Accurate punctuation is required to spell words Punctuation and capital letters/full stops ownership of plural nouns and where to put apostrophes before and