Introduction

Top-to-Bottom: Unlike other Online Writing Labs, the content here is carefully curated and sequenced in a very specific order, top to bottom. This order allows for scaffolding, building skills upon each other, to maximize student learning.

Target Goals: The order is one which has proven successful for students working toward college-level writing skills, including entrance skills tests. The skills here will also prove useful for business and technical writing, especially grammar, the writing process, and several lectures in the expository writing section. The ability to organize ideas in writing, and to produce well-edited writing, can even be beneficial in personal communications.

Expand Each Section: For each of the sections, you are encouraged to flesh out lessons with additional content and practice opportunities. The intent of this OWL is to guide you with a clear path that isn't muddied with too much extraneous content, but which still provides some resources you can immediately use as a foundation.

Sections & Focus for Each

Grammar

The grammar skills covered are also carefully sequenced, and in all cover most of the grammar and punctuation errors students make.

This section also gives students the foundations and vocabulary needed to more easily use a typical writing handbook. Most handbooks were written by and for English teachers, not students!

Have students work through the concepts, quizzing them along the way. Afterward, have them return to this as a resource they use when writing paragraphs and larger pieces of work.

Writing Process

This gives the big picture overview of writing, including helping students let go of possible perfectionism tendencies. They need to understand that writing is a process, and how to go through the steps in this process. Again, this is a resource students can later refer back to as they write their paragraphs and essays.

Expository Writing

Most college writing is this type of writing. Students start with simple paragraphs and move on to larger essays. They then learn some of the more common ways to organize those essays (e.g. comparison).

Research Writing with Persuasion

This builds upon the expository writing lessons, and it includes how to avoid plagiarism, evaluate sources, cite those sources, and then to use research to write persuasively.

Creating Writing & Literature Basics

This covers the basics of understanding and evaluating literature, and also gives foundations one can use to create their own creative writing. Once a student understands the concepts from this section, they can combine it with what they learned from the expository writing section to analyze and write about literature.

Additional Resources

These are just some additional resources that might prove useful, either for creating writing course plans, or for students who want additional references when completing writing projects.