Tag: research

So any­way, I meant to post about those Online Writ­ing Labs (OWLs) that many col­leges have put online.

Their con­tents and qual­i­ty vary wide­ly from one col­lege to the next. They’re intend­ed to help stu­dents write their papers at what­ev­er time they get around to doing them, wher­ev­er they hap­pen to be. Good ones include online access to ref­er­ence tools such as dic­tio­nar­ies, the­saurus­es, and gram­mar usage guides, a link to the school’s library, any for­mat­ting stan­dards estab­lished by his school in par­tic­u­lar, and some­times more spe­cif­ic mate­r­i­al depend­ing on the type of stu­dent expect­ed to be using the OWL.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some schools have slapped a list of links up on a set and called it an OWL. I won’t be rec­om­mend­ing any of those piti­ful lit­tle things.

Yes, it’s per­fect­ly fine for oth­ers to use these sites. They aren’t behind the school’s fire­walls, so they are a resource that has been gen­er­ous­ly shared with the pub­lic. If you find one espe­cial­ly help­ful, con­sid­er send­ing an email to the site’s authors/editors, thank­ing them for their efforts

• Roane State Com­mu­ni­ty College
• Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill
• Uni­ver­si­ty of Regi­na — serves to sup­port face-to-face tuto­ri­als. How­ev­er, the infor­ma­tion that is there is very inter­est­ing, so I includ­ed it.
• Uni­ver­si­ty of Illiois Urbana-Cham­pagne Writer’s Work­shop at The Cen­ter for Writ­ing Stud­ies — again, it sup­ple­ments in-per­son tutor­ing and work­shops. There is a fair amount of mate­r­i­al pro­vid­ed online as well, though.
• Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty offers online and offline help. The word­ing on their site caus­es me to won­der if they orig­i­nat­ed the use of the acronym “OWL.”
• The Writ­ing Cen­ter at Cleve­land State University