WRITING

Typing Practice

• Touch Typing. Free Program that lets you exercise and learn Touch Typing.

• Peter's Online Typing Course. A set of free online typing lessons and exercises.

• Type Racer. The global typing competition. Increase your typing speed while racing against others.

Writing Exercises for Beginners

• Jumbled Sentences. 200 Exercises for beginners to practice creating English sentences.

• Verb Tenses and Scrambled Sentences. Practice creating sentences in different verb tenses.

Writing Exercises

• Dictation Exercises. Online dictation to help improve your listening and writing skills.

• Sentence Structure Writing Practice. Exercises designed to practice writing wh- questions, passive voice, adjective clauses, and noun clauses.

Free-writing Practice

• Practice Free Writing with a Robot. An interesting way to improve ESL students' writing skills.

• Ron's ESL Blogs. For ESL teachers to exchange ideas and for ESL students to practice writing.

• ESL Online Talk Community. where you can find a friend from another country to communicate with in English.

• Daily Writing Prompts. Reveal inner thoughts, and share personal observations with the help of the carefully crafted "idea joggers".

• Free Writing Guidelines. Principles and suggestions for free writing.

Writing Guides

• Essay Structure. Basic essay structure, and structure of essays of all different kinds.

• Essay Scoring Criteria. Use the scoring guide to score each of your essays. They are also the scoring criteria for instructors to use.

• ESL Bee. For high intermediate or advanced English learners who have never taken a formal English writing course.

• Basic Paragraph Structure. Detailed discussion of the topic sentence, body sentences, and the concluding sentence.

• Purdue University Writing Lab Handouts. One of the earliest online writing lab. The Handouts section provides excellent guide to academic writing. There is also a section of English as a Second Language.

• Writers' Workshop. Grammar handbook, citation styles, ESL resources, and writing tips, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• Online Guide to Writing and Research. University of Maryland University College (UMUC) prvides this site, like an online writing textbook.

• Writing Guides - CSU. Colorado State University's online learning environment, an online textbook.

• Writing Guides. A concise, resource that will help you write solid college essays, research papers and book reports.

• Essay Info. Basics of essay writing, writing tips, essay types, citation styles, and so on.

• Writing: How to Write English Texts. Punctuation, essays, and business letters.

• English the Easy Way. Improve your Writing Skills including help with writing a resume and cover letters.

• Christmas Cards Verses. Good Christmas cards verses for you to choose from to send to your friends and loved ones.

Vocabulary Lists

• The Academic Word List. 570 most frequent words in the Academic Corpus.

• Vocabulary for High Intermediate Learners. Lists of the words for students who want to increase their vocabulary to the size of 4,000 - 7,000.

Common Mistakes

• Common Mistakes. A collection of some of the most frequently misspelled, commonly confused and easily misused words.

• Common Errors in English Usage. The site explains some of the most commonly misused and misunderstood aspects of English.

• Students' Essays. Learning from mistakes of other ESL/EFL writers.

Essay Topics

• 210 Best Essay Topics for College and University Students.

• 50 Argument Essay Topics. Good topics for your essay, speech, or debate.

• Writing Worksheets. Hundreds of writing topics provide teachers with meaningful writing tasks.

Format & Styles

• APA Style. Official website of the American Psychological Association.

• Technical Writing. Resources for writing reports and scientific abstracts, and business letters.

• Web Style Guide. An unabridged, online version of the third edition of Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton.

• A Guide for Writing Research Papers. Based on styles recommended by the American Psychological Association in question-and-answer format.

Research Tools

• Web Frequency Indexer. Cut and paste an article here, and you will get a list of words used in the article.

• Web Concordancer. You can search an online corpus for a word and display all the sentences in which the word occurs.