OWRC Handouts

Use this helpful guide to help you determine how to best allot your time when writing a course paper.

Why academic writing is different from writing you have done in high school.

A strong body paragraph explains, proves, and/or supports your paper’s argumentative claim or thesis statement. If you’re not sure how to craft one, try using this handy guide.

A claim persuades, argues, convinces, proves, or provocatively suggests something to a reader who may or may not initially agree with you. Learn more about making claims in your writing.

People read differently for different purposes. When you read in order to cram for a quiz, you might scan only the first line of every paragraph of a text. When you read for pleasure, you might permit yourself to linger for a long while over a particular phrase or image that you find appealing. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that when you read in order to write a paper, you must adopt certain strategies if you expect your efforts to be fruitful and efficient.

In your papers, it is often important to make a concession to the other side to make your argument stronger—that is, rather than acting like another side of your argument does not exist, you address it and “debunk” it. In fact, in an argument paper, presenting the other side and then “tearing it apart” can often be a very effective strategy.

Different cultures have different ideas about what constitutes an appropriate academic paper. In some cultures, where it is politically dangerous to write arguments, students are often taught to piece together their papers from certain “approved” materials. In other cultures, where argument is considered to be an overly “subjective” medium, students are taught to report just “the facts” in their papers. Imagine the distress these students feel when they arrive in America and are asked to create an academic argument.

A checklist for evaluating the quantity and quality of your writing.

There is no formula for writing effective introductions and conclusions—here are some strategies that you may find helpful.

Making sense out of your observations about a text is a difficult task. Even once you’ve figured out what it is that you want to say, you are left with the problem of how to say it. With which idea should you begin? Should you address the opinions of other thinkers? As to that stubborn contradiction you’ve uncovered in your own thinking: what do you do with that?

Most of us who compose on a computer understand revision as an ongoing, even constant process. Every time you hit the delete button, every time you cut and paste, every time you take out a comma or exchange one word for another, you’re revising.

Good reading makes good writing, time management, importance of spelling, reading your writing aloud and more.

Most of us know good style when we see it. We also know when a sentence seems cumbersome to read. However, though we can easily spot beastly sentences, it is not as easy to say WHY a sentence – especially one that is grammatically correct – isn’t working. We look at the sentence; we see that the commas are in the right places; we find no error to speak of. So why is the sentence so awful? What’s gone wrong?