Resource Library
Our resource library contains videos, handouts, student drafts, professional articles, diagrams, and more. Explore by topic or use the search box to narrow your results.
Types of Writing
Writing Process
Style and Technique
Formatting and Grammar
Analysis
Analysis is the process of taking a whole and separating that whole into its parts, then examining each part to determine that part’s relationship to the whole.
Art Analysis
Learning how to analyze art is not much different than analyzing things like data, literature, or rhetoric.
Critical Analysis
A critical analysis involves analysis and judgment. Like a film review, that both deconstructs a film and tells us whether we should see it.
Cover Letter
Cover letters are an important aspect of application materials because they are often the first impression an employer will have of you.
Literature Review
A literature review synthesizes existing research and makes a claim about the state of the scholarly conversation.
Opinion Editorial
An opinion editorial is an informal argument that seeks to persuade an audience to agree with the author’s claims and act on an issue.
Personal Narrative
Personal narratives are simple: it’s your story, told uniquely by you.
Rhetorical Analysis
Learning how to identify and analyze rhetorical tools is an important part of the academic experience.
Resume
A resume is a document typically required for employment and professional applications.
Source-based Persuasive Paper
Source-based persuasive writing uses research and persuasion to convince a reader of a specific argument.
Synthesis
Synthesis means seeing connections, drawing conclusions, scaffolding ideas, and adding two and two together.
Writing in the Sciences: IMRD
A common scientific writing format is IMRAD: Introduction, Methods, Results, And Discussion.
Purpose
Writing always has a purpose—each one of us writes because we want to communicate something to our audience.
Brainstorming
How do you narrow a general topic down to a specific thesis that you can explore or defend? Where do you even start?
Choosing a Topic
How do you choose what to write about in the first place? And, when you’ve decided, how do you know you’ve made a good choice?
Prewriting and Outlining
Staring at a blank white page can be intimidating, but this can be made less daunting by breaking the writing process down into smaller, shorter, simpler steps.
Researching!
Anything you observe, study, survey, analyze, or gather is "research."
Drafting
The drafting process (emphasis on process) is one of the most vital steps of writing, and yet it is all too often overlooked.
Revising
Revision means more than making a quick sweep for spelling errors. Revising a paper may require rethinking, rewriting, and restructuring.
Peer Review
All writers—emerging to advanced—can benefit from sharing their writing with careful, supportive readers.
Audience
Every piece of writing can be thought of as a conversation between its writer and its readers.
Clarity
How can you make your writing more clear?
Evidence
Evidence is simply the"details" or “particulars” that you, the writer, need to show your readers to help them understand whatever you’re trying to communicate.
Flow
"Flow" usually refers to how a text is organized. At the global level, how do ideas develop or progress from section to section? At the sentence level, do our sentences fit together?
Organization
“Organization” is a catch-all term referring to the patterns used to present information in writing.
Sentence Structure
On this page, you’ll find explanations of sentence types, along with examples of some common issues with sentence structure.
Style
In writing, style is the combination of the elements that make your writing unique and clearly convey your ideas.
Transitions
Transitions are words and phrases that connect and show relationships between ideas.
Thesis Statements
A thesis statement is the controlling idea in a medium of writing.
Tone
Tone is the writer's attitude toward their subject.
Topic Sentences
Think of a topic sentence as a mini thesis, or the “point” of a section or paragraph.
Voice
Who do your readers think you are? How do you come across?
Active and Passive Voice
One key decision writers routinely make is how to construct their voice–how do you, the writer, want your writing to sound?
Citation and Formatting Assistance
Looking for citation help? Need your formatting questions answered? Look no further!
Grammar, Punctuation, & Usage
Need help with grammar? Check out these resources!
Sentence Structure
On this page, you’ll find explanations of sentence types, along with examples of some common issues with sentence structure.