A hundred and twenty sentence patterns that appear constantly in US academic writing, each shown in use, in context, and then handed to you as a frame to fill.

Written for students who already speak English well and are still getting Cs on written work, which is a register problem rather than a language one and is fixable much faster than most people expect.

Why patterns rather than grammar

Because the gap is almost never grammatical. It is that academic English hedges in specific ways, attributes in specific ways, and concedes before it argues — and none of that is taught anywhere, it is simply absorbed by people who grew up reading it.

The sections

• Hedging and confidence — twenty patterns for claiming exactly as much as your evidence supports

• Attribution and citation — how to bring a source in without either hiding behind it or stealing from it

• Concession — the move that makes an argument look considered rather than one-sided

• Cause, correlation and mechanism — the distinctions US science writing is strict about

• Lab report conventions — tense, voice and what belongs in which section

• Literary analysis conventions, which follow almost opposite rules to the lab report

• Discussion and seminar language — entering, disagreeing, building

First-language appendices

Four short appendices covering the specific interference patterns produced by Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and Spanish. Article use, aspect and preposition choice are not random errors — they are predictable from your first language, and a targeted list of nine is worth more than a generic list of ninety.

212 pages. Lay-flat binding, with the pattern frames printed on the outer edge of each spread so they are findable while you are writing.