Academic Writing
The materials below have been curated from a range of sources to help students and faculty with the elements of academic writing. Faculty should feel free to direct students to these resources and/or to adapt them for their own use.
Generating Ideas
- Articulating your research topic
- Asking an analytical question
- Brainstorming
- Choosing a research topic
- College writing and the five-paragraph essay
- Conclusion ideas
- Idea and motive
- Identifying your audience
- Key questions for research
- Motivating the argument
- Opener ideas
- Prewriting strategies
- Tips for thesis analysis
- UWS lens essays
- UWS research essays
- Writing a research proposal
Sources and Evidence
- Agreeing, disagreeing, standing your ground
- Analyzing evidence
- Annotated bibliographies
- Asking an analytical question
- Checklist for analyzing materials
- Choosing and using sources: a guide to academic research
- Eight ways of using a source
- Function of sources across disciplines
- How to identify scholarly sources
- Incorporating sources
- Integrating quotations
- Phrases for introducing sources and quotations
- Skimming for relevance (articles)
- Skimming for relevance (books)
- Source functions across the disciplines
- Strategies for using sources
- Summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting
- Voice and analysis
- Working with quotations
Drafting and Revision
- Comparative essays
- Conclusions (avoiding repetition)
- Conclusions in the humanities
- Conclusions (quick tips)
- Counter-argument
- Features of a successful thesis
- Editing and proofreading
- Elements of an academic argument
- Ineffective introductions
- Introductions in the humanities
- Is your essay focused?
- Paragraphs; see also Introduction, Body, Conclusion, Research
- Proofreading tips and resources
- Reverse outlining
- Tips for editing
- Transitions
Style and Grammar
Citation
- American Medical Association citation
- American Psychological Association citation
- Chicago Manual of Style citation
- Modern Language Association citation
Other Resources
- Active and passive voice
- Active verbs for discussing ideas
- Articles
- Comma rules
- Concision
- Dummy subjects
- End stop punctuation, fragments and commas
- First person
- Four types of unnecessary words and phrases
- General rules of style (humanities)
- Grammar and punctuation
- Improving your writing style
- Misused words
- Parallelism
- Prepositions
- Qualifiers
- Run-on sentences
- Semicolon rules
- Semicolons, colons and dashes
- Sentence patterns
- Stitching words
- Style
- Subordinate clauses