Ask yourself: How much time do I spend dwelling on the past or worrying about the future? Next
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General Writing • Research and Citation • Teaching and Tutoring • Subject-Specific Writing • Job Search Writing • ESL
Academic Writing These OWL resources will help you with the types of writing you may encounter while in college. The OWL resources range from rhetorical approaches for writing, to document organization, to sentence level work, such as clarity. For specific examples of writing assignments, please see our Common Writing Assignments area.
The Rhetorical Situation This presentation is designed to introduce your students to a variety of factors that contribute to strong, well-organized writing. This presentation is suitable for the beginning of a composition course or the assignment of a writing project in any class.
Establishing Arguments These OWL resources will help you develop and refine the arguments in your writing.
Logic in Argumentative Writing This resource covers using logic within writing—logical vocabulary, logical fallacies, and other types of logos-based reasoning.
Paragraphs and Paragraphing The purpose of this handout is to give some basic instruction and advice regarding the creation of understandable and coherent paragraphs.
Essay Writing The Modes of Discourse—Exposition, Description, Narration, Argumentation (EDNA)—are common paper assignments you may encounter in your writing classes. Although these genres have been criticized by some composition scholars, the Purdue OWL recognizes the wide spread use of these approaches and students’ need to understand and produce them.
Conciseness This resource will help you write clearly by eliminating unnecessary words and rearranging your phrases.
Paramedic Method: A Lesson in Writing Concisely This handout provides steps and exercises to eliminate wordiness at the sentence level.
Reverse Paramedic Method This resource will help you write clear, concise sentences while remaining in the passive voice. Passive voice is used quite often in scientific writing.
Adding Emphasis This handout provides information on visual and textual devices for adding emphasis to your writing including textual formatting, punctuation, sentence structure, and the arrangement of words.
Sentence Variety This resource presents methods for adding sentence variety and complexity to writing that may sound repetitive or boring. Sections are divided into general tips for varying structure, a discussion of sentence types, and specific parts of speech which can aid in sentence variety.
Using Appropriate Language This handout will cover some of the major issues with appropriate language use: levels of language formality, deceitful language and euphemisms, slang and idiomatic expressions; using group-specific jargon; and biased/stereotypical language.
Active and Passive Voice This handout will explain the difference between active and passive voice in writing. It gives examples of both, and shows how to turn a passive sentence into an active one. Also, it explains how to decide when to choose passive voice instead of active.
Email Etiquette Although instant and text/SMS messaging is beginning to supplant email for some groups' primary means of Internet communication, effective and appropriate email etiquette is still important. This resource will help you to become an effective writer and reader/manager of email.
Email Etiquette for Students This presentation was designed in response to the growing popularity of email and the subsequent need for information on how to craft appropriate email messages. This presentation will help you send resumes and cover letters via email, and it will help you communicate with teachers / professors.
Using Foreign Languages in Academic Writing in English This resource provides information on strategies that the students can use when incorporating languages other than English in their academic texts.