本书作者Nigel Fabb为英国Strathclyde大学文学语言学教授、《语言学》编辑，Alan Durant为英同伦敦Middlesex大学英文教授，他们丰富的资历为本书提供了保障。本书的引进为我们高校本科生、研究生和教师提供了一本好教材，为广大读者提供了一本自修提高写作能力的好读本，同时也为文科学者，特别是语言学、文学学者提供了一本英文学术写作的参考指南。

在本版书中，作者仍然强调论文作者应该拓展自己的思路并张扬个人的写作风格。他们并不赞成给出一个套路让学生去模仿，而是指导读者在写作中遇到困难时读者怎样在书中给出的建议中找到适合自己的解决方案。

本书的主要亮点在于：学生论文的具体点评与分析；每个单元末的跟进小练习；长篇学位论文的特殊指导；新增网上查询、电脑写作和编辑内容；书中所列写作规范和策略适用于所有英语文学和文化专业学生；本书原版为朗文出版公司出版，现由培生教育集团授权四川大学出版社出版发行；Nigel Fabb为英国Strathclyde大学文学语言学教授、《语言学》编辑；Alan Durant为英同伦敦Middlesex大学英文教授。

PREFACE

UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION

 The importance of writing in literary studies

 Four basic principles

 Practice and experimentation

 Preparing for work

UNIT 2: WRITING ON A PRESCRIBED TOPIC

 What essay questions ask you to do

 Types of prescribed question

 Exam questions

UNIT 3: DEVISING YOUR OWN TOPIC

 Some questions to ask yourself

 Giving your chosen topic a structure

 Giving your essay a title

UNIT 4: WHAT MARKERS WANT

 Assessment criteria

 Learning outcomes

 FAQs about how you are marked

 Imagining your reader as someone particular

UNIT 5: SELECTING PRIMARY AND SECONDARY TEXTS

 How to choose your primary texts

 Kinds of primary text and how to use them

 How to choose secondary texts

 Keeping notes on your reading

UNIT 6: GETTING HELP FROM REFERENCE WORKS,ONLINE RESOURCES AND YOUR SUPERVISOR

 Using secondary texts

 Reference hooks

 Keeping references

 Reading what you found

 Learning By being supervised

UNIT 7: THE FIRST DRAFT

 Starting to write

 Keeping to a given format

 Writing to an outline

UNIT 8: DEVELOPING YOUR ARGUMENT

 Causation, correlation and coincidence

 Assembling a description or commentary

 Classification

 Presenting alternative arguments

 Experimenting

 Providing contexts for texts

 Comparing texts

 Building an argument around a word

UNIT 9: WEIGHTING DIFFERENT ELEMENTS IN　YOUR ARGUMENT

 Asserting, justifying and presupposing

 Generalising

 Giving examples

 Signalling attitude to your own argument

UNIT 10: THE VOICE TO WRITE IN

 Your register and your voice

 Mode of address

 Reacting to voices outside your adopted register

 Incorporating expressions from outside your adopted register

 Expressing taste and value

UNIT 11: REVISING AN ESSAY DRAFT

 Showing your essay's structure

 Sign-posting and connectives

 Mediating essay material for the reader

 Making local edits

 Keep earlier drafts or discard them?

UNIT 12: EDITING THE BEGINNING AND ENDING

 Particular prominence: the first paragraph

 Particular prominence: the last paragraph

 Beginnings, endings and essay structure

UNIT 13: INCORPORATING OTHER PEOPLE'S WORDS INTO WHAT YOU WRITE

 Quotation and paraphrase

 Indicating where someone else's words come from

 Plagiarism

UNIT 14: MISTAKES IN SPELLING, GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION

 What makes something a mistake and why does it matter?

 Problems with grammar

 Punctuation and the boundaries of the sentence: full stop, comma and semi-colon

UNIT 15: HANDING IN

 Meeting your deadline

 Judging when your essay is finished

 Bibliography

 Footnotes and endnotes

 Abstract or summary

 Table of contents

 Acknowledgements

 Final stage before submitting

 Preparing for a viva

 Publishing your work

Bibliography

Index

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