Category: Learning for Success

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...