A Guide to Writing for College by Veritas Prep

A Guide to Writing for College by Veritas Prep

Writing involves the physical act of marking words on paper. Writers can create coherent and incoherent composition. Writing heralds as the primary basis upon which people work and learn. Other people judge an individual’s intellect based on their ability to write. Writing serves as an outlet for people to express themselves as individuals. It communicates the chaos ruminating in our minds. Writing enables people to organize facts from opinions without getting confused. It also allows the writer to inject his or own personal views to influence the readership. All of these reasons show the importance of writing, especially when one harnesses effective strategy to communicate clearly.

Follow these resources to improve your writing skills:

The Writing Process

• The Writing Process: The University of Texas at El Paso’s Writing Center provides an overview of the writing process, including pre-writing, writing, and revising.

• What is the Writing Process, Anyways?: An extensive document that provides a detailed overview of the research on teaching writing as a process.

• Some Basic Terminology for The Writing Processes: A webpage that provides basic terminology that identifies certain steps in the writing process.

Prewriting

• What Is Prewriting?: This webpage investigates popular pre-writing strategies, including freewriting, brainstorming, clustering, and incorporating the journalistic technique of answering the who, what, when, where, why, and how’s of a story.

• Prewriting Techniques: An extensive document that provides effective prewriting techniques, including listing, cubing, freewriting, and clustering.

• English Prewriting Strategies: A webpage that provides examples of the aforementioned prewriting strategies.

• The Writing Process: Prewriting: A webpage describing the steps of the prewriting process, including thinking, questioning, freewriting, listing, clustering, and outlining the basic ideas of any major writing assignment.

• Handout: Pre-Writing Techniques: An extensive document providing a closer look at effective pre-writing strategies.

Thesis, Analysis & Structure

• How to Write Your Thesis: An educational webpage providing information on how to write a thesis.

• Writing a Literary Analysis Paper: An extensive document that provides details on how to write a literary analysis paper.

• Guidelines for Writing a Thesis or Dissertation: A guidebook teaching new writers the appropriate way of crafting a thesis or dissertation.

• Writing a Thesis: The Dartmouth Writing Program addresses the key points in writing an effective thesis.

• How to Write a Literary Comparison: A guide that teaches students how to write literary comparison, including examples of thesis statements and outlines with explanations.

Revision

• Smart Revision Strategies: An educational webpage providing strategies for revising drafts for space, content, tone, grammar and mechanics.

• What is Revision?: A brief introduction to the importance of revision in the writing process.

• Revision Myths: An extensive document that debunks myths that great writers simply hunch over a typewriter and finish their final copy without revising.

• Revising the Final Draft: A webpage full of fantastic resources focusing on revision.

• Revising the Draft: A reference webpage that defines revision, its steps, and specific examples to make the final draft standout from its original.

Grammar and Mechanics

• A Guide to Grammar and Writing: A webpage that allows viewers to select lessons, exercises, activities, and quizzes from the drop-down menu of their interest.

• Helpful Writing Resources – Mechanics: A compilation of writing resources pertaining to grammar and mechanics.

• Grammar: Who Needs It? (PDF): A paper that addresses the importance of grammar and mechanics in writing.

• Grammar and Writing Mechanics (PDF): A document that shows common grammatical and mechanical mistakes.

• Common Mistakes of English Grammar, Mechanics, and Punctuation: A webpage that addresses common grammatical and mechanical errors in writing.

Research Papers

• How to Write a Research Paper: A webpage providing a four-step process to writing a research paper.

• An Introduction to Writing a Research Paper: Pima Community College provides steps for writing a research paper, including the act of choosing a topic, finding sources, locating additional information, searching the Web, evaluating sources, and writing the paper.

• Steps To Writing A Research Paper: A guide that introduces the right steps to writing a research paper. It includes a checklist to ensure that student’s follow the right protocol when writing their first research paper.

• Writing Research Papers: Sorting the Noodles from the Soup: A chapter excerpt that teaches students the correct steps to writing a research paper.

• Citing Sources in Research Papers: MIT provides an all-inclusive webpage full of citation manuals for research papers, including APA, MLA, Chicago, and other styles.

Online Writing Lab

• The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL): The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) provides over two hundred resources, including writing, research, style guides, ESL, grammar and mechanics.

• Centralia Online Writing Lab: An online writing lab that offers a variety of tools and an e-mail based consultation service for those who need assistance.

• Doyle Online Writing Lab: The Doyle Online Writing Lab offers resources and related materials for students, tutors, and teachers.

• Utah Valley University’s Online Writing Lab: An online writing lab that provides a space for students to further their understanding of writing principles, and an outlet to improve their writing skills.

• UW-Madison Writer’s Handbook: An index of handouts directly from the writer’s handbook at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.