If you want to do proofreading in English, learning the difference between advice and advise might be a start.

It's available as an ebook via my uni library catalogue and there are no restrictions on downloading, so I have downloaded the whole book. PM your email address and I'll send it to you.

Hi Zimmerman,


Sorry you are having such a hard time. You're not alone in this as you'll see if you Google something like 'PhD damages mental health' or 'PhD depression anxiety'. I would really urge you to go back to your GP but also to seek help from your university counselling service, or your GP may be able to refer you to counselling. I had some cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety caused by trying to do a very stressful full-time job and a part-time PhD. It gave me some strategies to help me cope with things like not feeling able to leave the house or deal with difficult tasks at work.

In the meantime, be kind to yourself and try to spend time with people who are kind to you. Would you tell a friend who was feeling like this that they were stupid or a failure? Hopefully the answer is no, so there is no need to beat yourself up either.

A BSc is the minimum qualification needed to do the job. I don't know much about your field but I doubt the employers expected to give the job to someone who only had a BSc unless that person was a really strong candidate at interview. In my field a lot of job ads state that the minimum requirement is a teaching diploma but most jobs go to people with master's degrees and those people don't feel that they have taken a job which is beneath them. At least you'll be working in an academic environment with opportunities for networking and a chance to get a bit of teaching experience. I would make the most of it.

My university offers an MA in Drama Therapy. That could be a way to combine both your interests.

This one allows you to search for academic jobs, including post-docs, or sign up for alerts. It seems to cover all of Europe and a lot of other countries.

Nobody here can suggest a research topic for you. Do some reading. What are researchers in your field working on at the moment. What questions are coming out of their work? Find a question that interests you and then talk to your supervisor about whether that question is a feasible topic for a thesis.

Hi Candyfloss. Sorry you're having such a hard time. It's not unusual for PhD students to suffer from stress, anxiety and depression. Definitely contact the university counselling service because they can give you strategies to help you cope. Better to go now than risk it getting worse. Xx

According to their website, they have won 850 awards so clearly, metalizing, underlining well and not exceeding the beginning are the way to go. Shame about their inability to distinguish between plural and singular nouns.

Got it! Thanks Emmaki!

Does anyone have access to this article please?

Baratta, A. (2016) Keeping it real or selling out: The effects of accent modification on personal identity. Pragmatics and Society 7(2) pages 291 - 319. DOI:

Most universities offer some kind of study skills support service, so it would be worth investigating whether there is anyone at your uni who is able to provide some advice on writing at PhD level. Another idea would be to ask your supervisors if they could recommend one or two theses which they consider to be well written. Then compare them with your own writing and try to see what the good writers are doing differently. Or if you have any colleagues whose writing has been praised by their supervisors, perhaps you could ask one of them to comment on an extract from your thesis.

I teach academic writing to post-graduate students (mostly international but also some native speakers of English) and I've never found a book that provides really good advice on writing well. However, if all the suggestions above turn out to be no use, I can try to suggest a couple of not-too-awful books. It would help to know what field you are in. PM me if you like.

If the English in this post is any indication of the quality of work produced by these people, then the only 'extra ordinary' thing about the grade on any assignment that they write is likely to be how low it is!

Good luck GrumpyMule! You sound very well prepared. I can't think of anything I would add to your list. I completely understand your terror. I had a nightmare about the viva the day I submitted my abstract to a potential external examiner and I think fear is causing me to delay completing my thesis. Let us know the outcome!