The Writing Process These resources will help you with the writing process: pre-writing (invention), developing research questions and outlines, composing thesis statements, and proofreading. While the writing process may be different for each person and for each particular assignment, the resources contained in this section follow the general work flow of pre-writing, organizing, and revising. For resources and examples on specific types of writing assignments, please go to our Common Writing Assignments area.
Academic Writing These resources will help you with the types of writing you may encounter while in college. The resources range from rhetorical approaches for writing, to document organization, to sentence level work, such as clarity. For specific examples of writing assignments, please see our Common Writing Assignments area.
Common Writing Assignments These resources will help you understand and complete specific types of writing assignments, such as annotated bibliographies, book reports, and research papers. This section also includes resources on writing academic proposals for conference presentations, journal articles, and books.
Mechanics These resources will help you with sentence level organization and style. This area includes resources on writing issues, such as active and passive voice, parallel sentence structure, parts of speech, and transitions.
Grammar These resources will help you use correct grammar in your writing. This area includes resources on grammar topics, such as count and non-count nouns, articles (a versus an), subject-verb agreement, and prepositions.
Punctuation These resources will help you with punctuation, such as using commas, quotation marks, apostrophes, and hyphens.
Visual Rhetoric These resources will help you understand and work with rhetorical theories regarding visual and graphical displays of information. This area includes resources on analyzing and producing visual rhetoric, working with colors, and designing effective slide presentations.
Abstracts briefly summarize the main findings of a paper or book. By reading an abstract, the reader can tell whether or not a paper or book will cover the material in which they are interested.
These sites have good information on writing an abstract:
Not all information published in books or on the internet is credible or appropriate for your needs. It is important to make sure the sources you use are credible and at the right level for what you are doing.
These pages are useful guides to evaluate your sources:
By listing the sources from which you got your information, you give credit to the people who did the original research. Not giving credit is plagiarism.
Citing your sources also gives your readers the ability to look at that information and read more about the topic.
Citation Style Guides from the UBC Chapman Learning Commons, with instructions and examples for citing sources in APA, MLA, and Chicago/Turabian Styles.
Here is some useful information from the UBC Plagiarism Resource Centre to help you cite your sources:
How do I know if I'm plagiarizing or not? (how to know whether information should be cited or not)
How do I cite my sources? (help with formatting your references to the sources you used)
The University makes Turnitin software available to assist writers in making proper attributions and avoid plagiarism. Training guides and videos are available at Turnitin.com. For information on using Turnitin Click here go to video tutorials, training guides, and manuals @ http://www.turnitin.com/. Click here to go to www.Turnitin.com home page.
Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: WPA
You Quote It, You Note It (tutorial)
How Not to Plagiarize
Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It
What is Peer Review?
You can think of peer review as a "stamp of approval" from academic experts. When an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, you can be certain that experts in the relevant field have read it and, independent of their own particular opinions, verified it to meet a high standard of scholarship.
Scholars rely on peer review to ensure that the scholarship they exchange with each other is always based in good research and the established standards of their discipline.
The peer review system is similar to quality control systems that you see in everyday life. Just as you might be reassured to see a Health Department certificate in the window of a restaurant or a "Verisign" logo on a website that requires you to enter sensitive information, the peer-review system provides an efficient standard of trustworthiness in academic scholarship.
What is "High Standard of Scholarship"?
If an article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or by a reputable book publisher (such as a university press), you can assume that:
What's wrong with Google?
Google returns results on the basis of popularity. While popular beliefs can be correct, there are equally numerous instances when they are not. Given that the Internet--the source of all of Google's results--includes all sorts of misinformation, you cannot be certain that results returned from Google are unbiased and completely reliable.
In everyday life, we use Google to find generally undisputed questions of fact. But "generally undisputed" topics usually are not the focus of academic scholarship, and strong reliability is important when you are creating arguments to support your research. Also, peer-reviewed scholarly articles often are behind paywalls in subscription databases and journals that cannot be searched by Google, and articles often do not appear on open websites.
Google Scholar, however, is a separate Google search engine that is able to search through journals and scholarly venues. It is the best place to start if you want to use Google and see the side box on this page for more information.
What's wrong with Wikipedia?
Wikipedia strives for a higher level of reliability with constantly updated articles and its own system of peer-review. Still, Wikipedia has different priorities than an academic peer-reviewed resource, and therefore it should not be used in place of an academic source.
Wikipedia's design trades absolute reliability for convenience and quick updating. You can never be certain that what you read on Wikipedia doesn't include misinformation that has yet to be corrected. Likewise, while Wikipedia does include a system for citation and the editorial evaluation of its entries, its real-time and open updating means that you can never be absolutely certain you're reading accurate information.
But perhaps most important fact to remember is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are general information sources that are best used for gaining a quick overview of a topic, and they provide a list of resources and topics to guide you in further exploration. Encyclopedia articles generally avoid controversy, and the low level of detail provided by an encyclopedia is not sufficient for your academic research.
You can use Wikipedia as a starting point to figure out the initial facts about a topic and related information: but from there, use theEasy Search tool on the Library website to find reliable research materials.