In this learning area, you will find step-by-step support for writing a research paper (a paper with source material) for your college courses. In Research, the Excelsior OWL will help you as you begin to write your paper, pick a topic, conduct research for articles and books, draft your work, integrate your research, and revise and edit your finished paper.

In the Rhetorical Styles area of the Excelsior OWL, you’ll learn about different rhetorical styles or, essentially, different strategies for developing your essays and other writing assignments. These basic strategies are not all encompassing but will provide you with a foundation and a flexibility to help you as you engage in writing assignments in your introductory writing classes and beyond.

Designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs, written as a practical guide for students struggling to bring their writing up to the level expected of them by their professors and instructors.

Authors' Description:
This text is a transformation of Writing for Success, a text adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee.

Kathryn Crowther, Lauren Curtright, Nancy Gilbert, Barbara Hall, Tracienne Ravita, and Kirk Swenson adapted this text under a grant from Affordable Learning Georgia to Georgia Perimeter College (GPC, now part of Georgia State University) in 2015. Section 1.3 was authored by Rebecca Weaver. This text is a revision of a prior adaptation of Writing for Success led by Rosemary Cox in GPC’s Department of English, titled Successful College Writing for GPC Students (2014, 2015).

This open textbook offers students of technical writing an introduction to the processes and products involved in professional, workplace, and technical writing. The text is broken up into sections reflecting key components of researching, developing, and producing a technical report. Readers will also learn about other professional communication, designing documents, and creating and integrating graphics. Written especially for an academic setting, this book provides readers with guidance on information literacy and documenting sources. This book was collected, adapted, and edited from multiple openly licensed sources.

An open source e-textbook designed specifically for use in LBCC’s WD4 (Technical Writing for Welders) and all versions of IN4 (Technical Writing for CTE). In this easy-to-navigate textbook, you’ll find all the necessary lessons and handouts for the course.

IN4/WD4 covers the processes and fundamentals of writing field-specific technical documents, including organization and development, audience analysis, diction and style, writing mechanics and standard usage, and the editing, proofing, and revising process required for successful workplace writing. The course focuses on writing workplace documents commonly written by technicians: emails, descriptions, customer intake documents, project closeout documentation, bad news messages, instructions, summaries, accident reports, and employment docs (resumes and cover letters), etc.

Writing for Success is a text that provides instruction in steps, builds writing, reading, and critical thinking, and combines comprehensive grammar review with an introduction to paragraph writing and composition.

This course critically examines the U.S. Government’s foreign policy of intervention and regime change. We use such themes as -"magical thinking", e.g. author and reader bias, to critically analyze texts and our own knowledge of the causes and consequences of U.S. regime change around the world. Primary documents, historical studies, quantitative data and film are some of the materials for building up your General Education academic capabilities: critical thinking, active reading, clear writing, teamwork, information literacy, oral presentations and academic self assessment. This course revolves around fostering your ability to "know what you know so you can show what you know" that is, developing your academic self-knowledge and practicing self-directed learning in order to understand and meet college-level expectations.

This course covers processes and fundamentals of writing expository essays, including structure, organization and development, diction and style, revision and editing, and mechanics required for college-level writing.

Course Outcomes:

Analyze the rhetorical needs (the needs of their audience in relationship to the assignment) for academically-oriented writing assignments requiring them to use a broad range of critical thinking strategies, particularly analysis and evaluation.
Apply appropriate levels of critical thinking strategies (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) in their written assignments.
Implement appropriate rhetorical elements and organization (introduction, thesis, development and support, definition, narration, comparison, conclusion, etc.) in their written assignments.
Locate, evaluate, and integrate high-quality information and opinion appropriate for college-level analytical and evaluation assignments.
Craft sentences and paragraphs that communicate their ideas clearly and effectively using words, sentence patterns, and writing conventions at a college level to make their writing clear, credible and persuasive.

This is an introductory course meant to both expand your knowledge of good essay form and your confidence in your ability to create concise, clear, and cohesive college essays. We’ll look at several different forms of essays and destroy many great pieces of writing in order to learn how the heck we can do that stuff ourselves.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: At the completion of WR121, successful students should be able to:
Analyze the rhetorical needs (the needs of their audience in relationship to the assignment) for academically-oriented writing assignments.
Apply appropriate levels of critical thinking strategies (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) in their written assignments, with a focus on factual, analytical, and evaluative writing.
Implement appropriate rhetorical elements and organization (introduction, thesis, development and support, definition, narration, comparison, conclusion, etc.) in their written assignments.
Locate, evaluate, and integrate high-quality information and opinion appropriate for college-level informational, analytical and evaluative assignments.
Craft sentences and paragraphs that communicate their ideas clearly and effectively using words, sentence patterns, and writing conventions at a college level to make their writing clear, credible, and precise.

This class covers the process and fundamentals of writing expository essays, including structure, organization and development, diction and style, revision and editing.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: At the completion of WR122, successful students should be able to:
Analyze the rhetorical needs (the needs of their audience in relationship to the assignment) for academically-oriented writing assignments.
Apply appropriate levels of critical thinking strategies (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) in their written assignments, with a focus on factual, analytical, and evaluative writing.
Implement appropriate rhetorical elements and organization (introduction, thesis, development and support, definition, narration, comparison, conclusion, etc.) in their written assignments.
Locate, evaluate, and integrate high-quality information and opinion appropriate for college-level informational, analytical and evaluative assignments.
Craft sentences and paragraphs that communicate their ideas clearly and effectively using words, sentence patterns, and writing conventions at a college level to make their writing clear, credible, and precise.

Written by five college reading and writing instructors, this interactive, multimedia text draws from decades of experience teaching students who are entering the college reading and writing environment for the very first time. It includes examples, exercises, and definitions for just about every reading- and writing-related topic students will encounter in their college courses.

This handbook is designed for a generalized business writing course that seeks to meet the needs of a variety of student majors and career interests. In it you will find: descriptions and discussions of common genres, both routine and formal, print and electronic, and in-class activities and sample assignments. You will also find commentary on how to adapt the writing process to the rhetorical constraints of a workplace as well as how to think about, conduct, and use research outside an academic setting. Throughout you will note a persistent emphasis on audience awareness and direct style.

Write Here, Right Now: An interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research utilizes PressBooks to create and host a writing e-textbook for first year university students that would effectively integrate into the flipped classroom model. The textbook could also be used for non-flipped classroom designs, as the embedded videos, diagrams and linked modules would act as an all-in-one multimedia textbook geared towards multiple learning styles and disciplines. The components of the textbook, including the embedded videos, could be swapped in and out in order to accommodate a professor’s best idea of his/her own course design.

I’ve been involved with writing as a teacher and an author much of my life. I’ve written for academia and personal interest. I’ve had my writing evaluated for entrance into programs; resumes I’ve written documents that have been scrutinized for the workplace; I’ve had stories evaluated by editors for publication, but I have never had my writing evaluated by artificial intelligence (AI). In my training as a teacher, I wasn’t taught to teach writing for an audience that wasn’t human. I wasn’t taught to look at writing as it would be seen by artificial intelligence. Yet, that is what the students in my classroom will face at the end of their coursework. It will not be up to me to evaluate their writing. They will face a standardized test and an automated essay grader. The purpose of this book is not to debate the use of Automated Essay Graders (AEG) or the pros and cons of AEG. I am creating this book in 2020 because AEG is a fact of life for the students I teach.

Have you ever received a writing assignment, thought “this won’t take long” and then stayed up all night writing the night before your assignment was due because it ended up taking a lot longer than you thought it would? If you have, you’re not alone. Many beginning writers struggle to plan well when it comes to a writing assignment, and this results in writing that is just not as good as it could be. When you wait until the last minute and fail to engage in a good writing process, you’re not doing your best work—even if you did “get all A’s in high school” as a procrastinator. In this step-by-step support area, you will find everything you need to know about writing a paper from start to finish.

This resource offers self-paced modules that will help you review key topics in writing. Each module provides instruction followed by review questions. The modules can be completed individually or in sequence. After completing a module, you have the option to download or print a completion report to share with a tutor, instructor, or save for posterity!

In the age of Buzzfeeds, hashtags, and Tweets, students are increasingly favoring conversational writing and regarding academic writing as less pertinent in their personal lives, education, and future careers. Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking and Communication connects students with works and exercises and promotes student learning that is kairotic and constructive. Dr. Tanya Long Bennett, professor of English at the University of North Georgia, poses questions that encourage active rather than passive learning. Furthering ideas presented in Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First-Year Composition as a complimentary companion, Writing and Literature builds a new conversation covering various genres of literature and writing. Students learn the various writing styles appropriate for analyzing, addressing, and critiquing these genres including poetry, novels, dramas, and research writing. The text and its pairing of helpful visual aids throughout emphasizes the importance of critical reading and analysis in producing a successful composition. Writing and Literature is a refreshing textbook that links learning, literature, and life.

Writing in College is designed for students who have largely mastered high-school level conventions of formal academic writing and are now moving beyond the five-paragraph essay to more advanced engagement with text. It is well suited to composition courses or first-year seminars and valuable as a supplemental or recommended text in other writing-intensive classes. It provides a friendly, down-to-earth introduction to professors’ goals and expectations, demystifying the norms of the academy and how they shape college writing assignments. Each of the nine chapters can be read separately, and each includes suggested exercises to bring the main messages to life.