This Module highlights the differences between students who write well and those who struggle. Elements of the writing process are discussed, as are the prerequisite skills students need to write good papers. The module outlines and describes the process for teaching students the POW+TREE strategy, a writing strategy to help students produce better persuasive essays (est. completion time: 2 hours).

Emphasizes the logical means of supporting claims in argumentative essays, thesis statements and reasoning. Includes logic, style and research.



This project was funded by a grant from the Higher Education Coordinating Commission in Oregon, a grant that ran from July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017. The text of the book is complete (though, in the way of these things, still evolving), but moving it online is still in progress. The chapters available here are ready to be used or copied; additional chapters will be added during July as the conversion and final copyedits are completed.

The layout of our book implies there is a beginning, middle, and end to a writing course, but because writing is both an art and a skill, people will find their own processes for learning, improving, and using these skills. Writing processes differ because we are each looking for a workable schemata that fits our way of thinking. Try out a variety of writing processes and strategies, and find what works for you. If you are not uncomfortable on this journey, you simply are not stretching yet.

A quick glance through the book will show you that it deftly covers the basics, which are always important to review as you get ready to build onto your scaffolding. Reminders of terminology that form the foundation of a discipline—as well as explanations, descriptions, and examples of their use in a basic education—are in chapters such as “Critical Reading,” “Writing Basics: What Makes a Good Sentence,” “The Writing Process,” “Punctuation,” and “Working with Words.” These are, of course, fundamentals that you have worked with throughout your education, learning in each course skills and habits that elevate your reading, writing, and thinking abilities. This college writing course will ensure that you take another step up to college and professional writing.

This text is different in its emphasis on research skills and research writing. The form you will learn, the building blocks of that form, the formality, and the sacrosanct crediting of sources is explained here from English professors and our instructional librarian at the college. Leaning on questions that lead to searches for answers that lead to arguments that present your understanding, the chapters “Critical Reading,” “Rhetorical Modes,” and “Argument” will fill out your growing appreciation of and comfort with the research form in everyday life. From the discussion of source types to guidance through the research process to the models of essay deconstruction, you will find that the expectations and language of this text begin with the college-level student in mind.

Working through this text will elevate you into the next stage of writing for a 21st century student and professional.

Students apply the knowledge gained from the previous lessons and activities in this unit to write draft grant proposals to the U.S. National Institutes of Health outlining their ideas for proposed research using nanoparticles to protect against, detect or treat skin cancer. Through this exercise, students demonstrate their understanding of the environmental factors that contribute to skin cancer, the science and mathematics of UV radiation, the anatomy of human skin, current medical technology applications of nanotechnology and the societal importance of funding research in this area, as well as their communication skills in presenting plans for specific nanoscale research they would conduct using nanoparticles.

Open English @ SLCC is an evolving digital book created and maintained by English Department faculty at Salt Lake Community College. It exists to provide our faculty–over one hundred full- and part-time instructors–with robust, flexible, and locally produced open educational resources (OER) that can be used for teaching a variety of courses across our composition sequence.

This book is evolving and adaptive, offering a range of texts on rhetoric, writing and reading, all written by SLCC faculty with specific attention to the needs of SLCC students and the local conditions of our work and study at a large, multi-campus, increasingly diverse community college in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unlike a traditional textbook, the writing in this book invites remix, adaptation, and repurposing to match the specific needs of its users–SLCC writing students and instructors primarily–but also faculty and students at other schools, course designers, WPAS, and anyone else interested in open texts about writing, language and literacy.

Open English @ SLCC is a community-authored, community-focused text, one that invites conversation, change, addition, and repurposing over time in the interests of attuning itself to the needs of those who use it. To this end the book invites public digital annotation through Hypothesis, allowing readers to add notes, questions, observations and resources directly to the texts. This ethos of shared knowledge, creative reuse, and ongoing conversation is at the heart of the Open English @ SLCC project.

This is a guide for students to use as they provide feedback to their peers on a piece of writing. The activity was done in groups of 3.

This Open Educational Resource is a collection of texts and materials that team together students’ familiarity with sports and critical inquiry skills. Sports has an undeniable fascination for cultural studies scholars, and the athletic competition and the social conversations it elicits can help students to see how ethical argumentation plays beyond the walls of the ivory tower. The Politics of Sports, as a broad field of study, is of interest to both scholars and pundits alike. Through inquiry into sports, students can see how debate functions in both academic and public spheres. We have found sports to inspire a wide range of independent research topics in our writing classrooms that challenge students to engage with complex research questions that delve into the social structures that shape what we value and how we act as citizens. Sports is often central to the college experience and ubiquitous in families and communities around the world. The wide variety of audiences interested in sports the personal, economic, and social values tied up in sports invites research writers to think carefully about audience, community, and stakes of argument. We believe that The Politics of Sports has the potential to capture the interest of college students in order to excite them to begin a research journey with a sense of authority and investment in a topic that is at once familiar and complex enough to yield a wide range of inquiry .

Professional business communication is essential to the success of any corporation. This could include writing memos, reports, or proposals. Small businesses all the way up to corporations can benefit from professional and technical communication.

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.

Student pairs reverse engineer objects of their choice, learning what it takes to be an engineer. Groups each make a proposal, create a team work contract, use tools to disassemble a device, and sketch and document their full understanding of how it works. They compile what they learned into a manual and write-up that summarizes the object's purpose, bill of materials and operation procedure with orthographic and isometric sketches. Then they apply some of the steps of the engineering design process to come up with ideas for how the product or device could be improved for the benefit of the end user, manufacturer and/or environment. They describe and sketch their ideas for re-imagined designs (no prototyping or testing is done). To conclude, teams compile full reports and then recap their reverse engineering projects and investigation discoveries in brief class presentations. A PowerPoint(TM) presentation, written report and oral presentation rubrics, and peer evaluation form are provided.

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.

This is a course for Dutch (Bachelor) students who need or want to pay some extra attention to their English language skills. In this course you will find four modules with theory and exercises on Listening, Grammar, Vocabulary and Writing. We will also give you links to useful websites. We strongly recommend that you do not try to do this course in as short a time as possible: learning skills takes time, so you will benefit optimally from the course if you spend weeks, rather than days on it.

A retired master teacher of English and Comparative Literature teams up with his son, a History professor, on a new version of the writing manual he wrote and used for decades at the University of California, Davis.

Tá Falado includes 46 podcast lessons on the pronunciation and grammar of Portuguese, specifically designed to help those who already speak Spanish. The lessons are built around Portuguese dialogs that are repeated in Spanish, providing a direct comparison of the two languages. All lessons include downloadable PDF files with the transcripts and notes, mp3 audio files, and blog discussions. Additionally all of the dialogs present cultural scenarios that illustrate differences between North American and Brazilian culture.

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 resources is an online video available in the "World Science Festival" open education series. The video "From Tablets to Tablets: A History of Writing" is included in the Technology section of the series.

This resources is an online video available in the "World Science Festival" open education series. The video "The Technology of Writing: From Stone Tablets to Tablet Devices" is included in the Technology section of the series.

This is an excellent resource to use in place of a handbook. The sections on MLA and APA documentation are clear and current.

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.