Online writing centers and general writing guides
- Probably the best-known online writing center, the Purdue OWL offers information on anything from general writing techniques, to citation rules, to ELL resources.
- UNC Chapel Hill’s online writing center offers accessible, student-centered, and trustworthy writing resources, e.g. handouts, examples, explanations, and videos, on all aspects of writing assignments, the writing process, and genres across the disciplines.
- Harvard’s website offers a number of strategies for essay writing geared for students.
Citation and plagiarism
- Indiana University’s Plagiarism Tutorials and Tests website includes detailed guides on detecting and avoiding plagiarism, including video case studies of plagiarism, common errors in paraphrasing, and exercises.
- The Citation Game allows learners to test their knowledge of the most common citation styles, including MLA, APA, and Chicago.
Grammar
- Grammar Bytes presents grammatical topics in a light-hearted manner and includes examples, exercises, handouts, and other resources for students and faculty.
- The University of Adelaide has created this guide to categorize common reporting verbs in terms of their function, strength, and grammatical features.
- This site uses examples to present common misuses of parts of speech.
Multimodal Writing and Information Literacy
- This website includes an infographic that illustrates key principles of visual design.
- UConn’s website lists key guidelines for developing multimodal assignments and provides examples of multimodal assignments in writing classes.
- The Harvard Law School Library has created this guide to understand and effectively use public domain and Creative Commons media.
Peer Review and Feedback
- University of Michigan’s page on Using Peer Review to Improve Student Writing provides an overview of peer review, as well as general strategies and handouts geared for faculty and students.
Word Choice and Style
- SentenceYourDictionary allows the user to search for a word and see contexts in which this word is often used, offering insight into its collocations, connotations, and grammatical features.
- The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, created by the author of the xkcd comic series, offers an exercise in conciseness and clarity by forcing the writer to explain complex ideas using only the 100 most commonly used words in English.
- UMass Amherst’s website presents global and sentence-level strategies for increasing cohesion in student writing.
- This short guide offers an overview of the key hedging strategies in English and provides examples.
- This detailed guide explains the difference between connotation and denotation, and provides a lot of examples.
- This guide summarizes key strategies for conciseness, including eliminated empty or inflated phrases, avoiding unnecessary repetitions, and reducing clauses and phrases.
Other Resources
- This concise guide highlights key characteristics of professional e-mail writing.
- Florida State University’s website lists a number of different ice breakers for use in writing (and other) classes.
- This guide explains how to write and capitalize effective titles for scholarly texts.
- Duke Writing Program’s Writing for Specific Disciplines website provides overviews of discipline specific writing, including guide on Visual Studies/Literacy, Economics, Political Science, and more.
- Vanderbilt’s Writing Studio offers detailed scripts for in-class writing workshops (geared for writing consultants/tutors as well as instructors).