Tl;dr: A Very Brief Guide to Reading and Writing in University

A concise writing resource for anxious college students.

You’ve just been assigned your very first college paper. Are you unsure of how to start? Do you feel stressed about failing, or are you worried that you’ll have to pull all-nighters to get the work done? And what even is APA style? If you feel uncertain, stuck, or overwhelmed, be encouraged, because this book has the tools you need to own that assignment! The quick, concise chapters of TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) will help you identify your audience, create an outline, get a handle on grammar and sentence structure, correctly quote a source, and write a strong conclusion. If you want to know what and how professors expect you to write--and why--so you can get those grades with as little pain as possible, this is the book for you. This book will show you how to write better papers, and it’s short, so you should read it!

Joel Heng Hartse is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses related to academic writing, literacy, and teaching English as an additional language. His other books include Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China and Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do. He is president of the Canadian Association for Studies in Discourse and Writing. He lives in Vancouver.