The totally restructured SAT college entrance exam that became effective in 2005 includes an entirely new and very important Writing Test, which consists of two main parts. First is a 25-minute period during which students must write an essay on a given topic. Later, students must answer multiple-choice questions that test their skill in correcting poorly-written sentences, finding mistakes in grammar and usage, and correcting mistakes in the first-draft version of a student essay. This manual familiarizes students with all aspects of the SAT Writing Test and presents review chapters and questions with answers that are designed to hone test-takers' skills. Also included is a helpful overview of the Writing Test and details on how student essays are scored. This manual presents five writing tests. The first introduces students to the test's format and the following four are similar to the actual SAT writing test in length and question types. All tests have answers and explanations, and come with instructions on how students can convert their practice test score to the familiar SAT scale of 200-800.

The pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse – commentary on the ongoing discourse – is beginning to take its rightful place among the major topics of discourse studies. This book makes simultaneous contributions to the theory of metadiscourse, corpus-based methods of studying such phenomena, and our knowledge of metadiscourse use in written English. After comprehensively reviewing previous research, it introduces a more rigorous and empirical approach to metadiscourse studies. Дdel presents a new model of metadiscourse based on Jakobson’s functions of language, and other conceptual tools, including explicit features for defining metadiscourse, a taxonomy of the functions it serves, and maps of the boundaries between it and related phenomena. A large-scale study of writing by L1 and L2 university students is presented, in which the L2 speakers’ overuse of metadiscourse strongly marks them as lacking in communicative competence. This work is of interest both to linguists and to educators concerned with writing in English.

The language needed for writing about visuals such as graphs and tables is quite complex in English. For students taking the IELTS Academic Module, the Writing Task I presents a number of challenges. University students and others writing reports also often need assistance to be able to describe graphs and diagrams accurately.

Unique in offering students hands-on practical experience of textual analysis focused on speech and writing.