study hard.

1 / 100 days of productivity 

17 april, 2017

finally started on my modern history notes! this was my first time trying to make my notes look good and i think i did alright. currently trying to fix my sleeping schedule so that i can properly revise before school starts again.

Working on an essay or a paper? Looking for feedback, help or editing support but have no idea where to turn for unbiased, constructive criticism and professional advice? Here are some great resources to help get you going!

General 

Harvard’s Strategies for Essay Writing

Queen’s University Online Thesis Manager

How To Write A Great Essay About Anything 

How to Write Dazzlingly Brilliant Essays: Sharp Advice for Ambitious Students

University of Cambridge - How to Write a Paper

Purdue OWL: Writing a Research Paper

Microsoft Research -  How to write a great research paper

Georgetown University - How to Write a Research Paper

University of South California -  Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper: Guide

Abstract Writing

Berkeley - HOW TO WRITE AN ABSTRACT: Tips and Samples   

Purdue OWL - Writing Report Abstracts

University of Toronto - The Abstract

How to write a good abstract for a scientific paper or conference presentation

Introductions and Conclusions

Columbia University - Writing a Good Introduction 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Introductions

Birmingham City University - Writing Introductions

University of Toronto - Introductions and Conclusions

Purdue OWL - Writing a Developed and Detailed Conclusion

Harvard - Ending the Essay: Conclusions

Editing

Paper Rater

Ginger’s Essay Checker

Hemingway Editor

ProWritingAid

editMinion

After the Deadline

Slick Write

Grammarly

GrammarBase

Citation

Citation Machine

BibMe

EasyBib

RefMe: APA

RefMe: MLA

Cite This For Me

Hey guys! This post has been coming for a really long time, I’m sorry to have kept you all waiting but university readings have kept me very very busy! I have compiled a list of books which are classics (in their own way, some even being modern classics). Books that I’ve read and loved or other people in my life have loved have been italicised and this list includes links to my favourite covers/the edition of the book that I own since you all ask me where I buy my books from on my bookstagram (and that is from book depository!). I hope you enjoy this, stay bookish 📚

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 

The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 

A Tale of Two Cities; Bleak House; Great Expectations; Major Works by Charles Dickens

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer 

The Four Tragedies and The Four Histories; The Complete Works by William Shakespeare

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo 

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett 

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Northanger Abbey; Persuasion; Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Sense and Sensibility; Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (*cough* my name is mentioned here *cough*)

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery 

Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 

Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Far from the Madding Crowd; Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Middlemarch by George Eliot

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis 

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Stranger; The Fall; The Myth of Sisyphus; The Plague by Albert Camus

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Beowulf

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Candide by Voltaire

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Bhagavad Gita

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Paradise Lost  by John Milton

The Divine Comedy by Dante

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway; A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

The Trial; Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Antigone by Sophocles

The Republic by Plato

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Utopia by Thomas More

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

1984 by George Orwell

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Harry Potter by JK Rowling

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Brothers Karamazov; Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Confessions by St Augustine of Hippo

The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

A Passage to India; A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins

The Plays by Christopher Marlowe

Norwegian Wood; Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Secret History; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

[other links]

all my masterposts

my study/book instagram @ aristotelian

my goodreads @ mitochondrions [also snapchat if u wanna]

So I’ve been reading a lot of amateur writing lately, and I’ve noticed what seems to be a common problem: dialogue. 

Tell me if this looks familiar. You start writing a conversation, only to look down and realize it reads like: 

“I’m talking now,” he said. 

“Yes, I noticed,” she said. 

“I have nothing much to add to this conversation,” the third person said. 

And it grates on your ears. So much ‘said.’ It looks awful! It sounds repetitive. So, naturally, you try to shake it up a bit: 

“Is this any better?” He inquired. 

“I’m not sure,” she mused. 

“I definitely think so!” that other guy roared. 

This is not an improvement. This is worse. 

Now your dialogue is just as disjointed as it was before, but you have the added problem of a bunch of distracting dialogue verbs that can have an unintentionally comedic effect. 

So here’s how you avoid it: You mix up the dialogue with description. 

“Isn’t this better?” He asked, leaning forward in his seat. “Don’t you feel like we’re more grounded in reality?” 

She nodded, looking down at her freshly manicured nails. “I don’t feel like a talking head anymore.” 

“Right!” That annoying third guy added. “And now you can get some characterization crammed into the dialogue!” 

The rules of dialogue punctuation are as follows: 

Each speaker gets his/her own paragraph - when the speaker changes, you start a new paragraph. 

Within the speaker’s own paragraph, you can include action, interior thoughts, description, etc. 

You can interrupt dialogue in the middle to put in a “said” tag, and then write more dialogue from that same speaker. 

You can put the “said” tag at the beginning or end of the sentence. 

Once you’ve established which characters are talking, you don’t need a “said” tag every time they speak. 

Some more examples: 

“If you’re writing an incomplete thought,” he said, “you put a comma, then the quote mark, then the dialogue tag.” 

“If the sentence ends, you put in a period.” She pointed at the previous sentence. “See? Complete sentences.” 

“You can also replace the dialogue tag with action.” Extra guy yawned. “When you do, you use a period instead of a comma.”

So what do you do with this newfound power? I’m glad you asked. 

You can provide description of the character and their surroundings in order to orient them in time and space while talking. 

You can reveal characterization through body language and other nonverbal cues that will add more dimension to your dialogue. 

You can add interior thoughts for your POV character between lines of dialogue - especially helpful when they’re not saying quite what they mean. 

You can control pacing. Lines of dialogue interrupted by descriptions convey a slower-paced conversation. Lines delivered with just a “said” tag, or with no dialogue tag at all, convey a more rapid-fire conversation. 

For example: 

“We’ve been talking about dialogue for a while,” he said, shifting in his seat as though uncomfortable with sitting still. 

“We sure have,” she agreed. She rose from her chair, stretching. “Shall we go, then?” 

“I think we should.” 

“Great. Let’s get out of here.” 

By controlling the pacing, you can establish mood and help guide your reader along to understanding what it is that you’re doing.