This book is for university students, with at least a mid-intermediate level of English. It is designed both for self-study and also as a support for a course on academic communication. It can thus be used alongside the companion volumes: Writing an Academic Paper in English and Giving an Academic Presentation in English. The book focuses only on those areas that are either the most commonly found in academic communication and/or cause the most problems. It is thus considerably more accessible than a traditional grammar or style guide. Grammar coverage includes: articles (a/an, the), countable vs uncountable nouns, modal verbs (can, may, could, might), comparisons, present and past tenses, link words, prepositions, and verbs that cause grammatical difficulties. There is a strong focus on those elements that make a paper more readable, and a presentation more accessible and memorable: clarity and empathy, sentence length, word order, and punctuation. There are chapters on two key areas of communication in academia: writing emails to editors, drafting a CV/resume.

The book is laid out simply, with short explanations, and lots of example sentences (plus typical mistakes). Other books in the series: Writing an Academic Paper in English Giving an Academic Presentation in English Adrian Wallwork is the author of more than 40 ELT and EAP textbooks. He has trained several thousand PhD students and researchers from around 50 countries to write research papers and give presentations. He is also the co-founder of e4ac.com, an editing agency for non-native English-speaking researchers.