This helpful guide is designed to assist new graduate students as well as more experienced dissertation candidates to improve their academic writing. Designed especially for students in social sciences, education, and business, it distinguishes academic writing from business and professional writing and offers helpful hints to smooth the graduate's path to success. The book contains a punctuation refresher, common grammatical and stylistic errors to avoid, and a checklist of the most common APA formatting errors. The author is a former college professor of writing who works as a freelance editor and APA instructor.