Some rules of writing English

1) To join two independent clauses, use a comma followed by a conjunction, a semicolon alone, or a semicolon followed by a sentence modifier. 

2) Use commas to enclose subordinate clauses or phrases, which are not essential to the sentence's meaning.

3) Do not use commas to bracket phrases that are essential to a sentence's meaning.

4) When beginning a sentence with an introductory phrase or an introductory (dependent) clause, include a comma.

5) Make the subject and verb agree with each other, not with a word that comes between them.

7) Use the active voice unless you specifically need to use the passive voice.

8) Omit unnecessary words.

Writing Resources

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

Careerlab.com - 200 FREE Cover Letters For Job Hunters

Good Essay Topics. A collection of great topics for your college paper or essay, and 10 tips for choosing a thrilling essay Topic.

The 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.

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

Technical Writing. An online textbook for technical writing. It's also a good online reference book.

Web Style Guide. Yale online design manual dealing with Web design principles and various Web design issues.

Writing Studio. A free, password-protected writing/learning environment that offers WYSIWYG writing tools.

Writers' Workshop at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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

APA Style Official website of the American Psychological Association.

Writing for the Web Research on how users read on the Web and how authors should write.

Essay Writing A step-by-step guide to essay-writing.

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

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

Online Writing Collaboration Project is the meeting place on cyberspace for English teachers and learners.

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.

1-Language Chat. A Popular ESL chatroom that does not require any registration to enter.

Writing? How to write English Texts. Punctuation, essays, and business letters.

Paradigm Online Writing Assistant. A lot of information about how to write informal essays, thesis/support essays, argumentative essays, and exploratory essays.