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Supporting Your Professional Career with Effective Writing
Many students question the need to develop their professional writing skills when texting, messaging, and social media seem to dominate communication in many environments. Indeed, we can message our accountant, text our doctor, or chat with our child’s teacher. However, professional disciplines require a formal writing style, standard grammar, and word usage that are essential...
Finally Found: The Golden Fleece to Improve Student Correspondence to a Professor!
THE PROBLEM. “Dear (I forgot your name) professor” … “”Could give more clarification about the thing you mentioned in that section of my paper where I discussed it like you told me?” … [first sentence of first paragraph] “I DONT KNOW WHY YOU AINT SEEING MY RESPONSES IN DISCUSSION!” … [first few sentences of first...
Some Thoughts on the Question, “Why Do We Have to Write?”
Hi folks! This is Robley, a tutor in the Writing Center. In the previous blogcast, Kurtis shared my video Why Write?, which focuses on the writing most people do outside of school (like sympathy notes, grocery lists, text messages, and the like). I hoped my video would inspire students to realize that they’re already writers....
New Publishing Schedule
Hey, everyone, this is Kurtis from the Writing Center with an update on the Academic Success Center blogcast schedule. This post will be the last weekly Friday post as we will be moving to a biweekly publishing schedule. Additionally, while I will still write and record blogcasts, we will welcome new voices from Purdue University...
Finding Balance When Using Research
Last week I shared research writing resources located in the Writing Center at Purdue Global University and talked briefly about research writing. One of the resources I mentioned concerned what I can best describe as using the right balance of content from the student writer and content from the research. One error many new-to-college writers...
Research Writing Resources
Research writing is time consuming, and for many student researchers, questions pop up along the way. Am I citing this source correctly? Have I paraphrased effectively? Am I using too many direct quotations? And on and on. Fortunately, the Writing Center at Purdue Global University has a number of helpful resources to assist you in...
Don’t Drop Quotes
One of the skills college writers need is the ability to work with sources. Students need to be able to paraphrase, summarize, and quote, and in order to do that they need to be able to integrate such content into the fabric of their own writing. Typically, most college writers can work in paraphrased or...
Whilst I Was Reading
Whilst I was reading the other day, I noticed the annoying frequency with which the word “whilst” was suddenly being used. I don’t recall the word being used often if at all, but now, out of the blue, the word is being plopped into sentences. Why? Does anyone need to write a sentence like “The...
College Writing & Professor Expectations
For many new college students, the thought of taking a writing course is greeted with the same kind of enthusiasm you would have for visiting the dentist for a root canal: something that needs to be done but will be unpleasant, perhaps painful. This reaction may be due to a high school English class taught...
The It’s/Its/Its’ Conundrum
Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more errors in two sound-alike words: the possessive pronoun “its” and the contraction for “it is.” Writers seem confused (or perhaps just too rushed?) about whether or not the three-letter word needs an apostrophe or not, and in some hard-to-forget instances, exactly where to place that apostrophe. I say...
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