English Proofread

Keep your finger on the pulse of current scientific debate via Retraction Watch which keeps up to date with peer reviewing in the scientific community.

We recommend Oxford Dictionaries as an excellent resource when writing in either American or British Standard English.

These helpful six-minute radio programmes produced by the BBC teach you individual aspects of English grammar (you may have to use a proxy server to access these if outside the UK).

“East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet,” Rudyard Kipling wrote. Nonsense! The two have been meeting for centuries, leaving their mark on both Arabic and the languages of Europe. Here are 40 English words that you never knew came from the Arab Middle East.

Read the full article Arabic words in English.

The UK’s The National Archives offers an unrivalled archival resource for everything from images to sound, newspapers to maps.

If you have ever wondered about how to distinguish between (or even understand!) the different accents across the UK, these BBC pages give you written as well as recorded examples.

These excellent webpages from the British Council offer free lesson plans, Cambridge Dictionary searches, resources for teaching English to teens and children, and much more. Well worth browsing.

Taking time management seriously could significantly enhance your chances of achieving your academic goals while at university and here’s how. Click here for a rather good time management guide from the University of Guelph containing some useful ideas on getting to grips with time management.

…and now for something completely different. If you are a science researcher with an artistic bent, why not submit a design for the University of Cambridge’s Science Festival in 2014? Competition ends on 1st October 2013, so let’s get drawing!

The apostrophe is being banned from street names in parts of Devon to “avoid potential confusion”.

Mid Devon District Council said its new streets had not contained apostrophes for many years, but the policy was now being made official.

It said apostrophes could only be found in three street names in the district.

It added that Beck’s Square and Blundell’s Avenue, both in Tiverton, and St George’s Well in Cullompton, were “all named many, many years ago”.

Andrew Lacey, from the council, said there was “no national guidance that stops apostrophes being used”.

But proofreader Mary de Vere Taylor from Ashburton said the thought of apostrophes being removed made her “shudder”.

“It’s almost as though somebody with a giant eraser is literally trying to erase punctuation from our consciousness,” she told BBC News.