Did you know that there is an ad-free citation machine build into Google Doc? You can access for free, and it will even generate your in-text citations (just not the page numbers). Check it out!
A Blog of Writing Resources from The University of Scranton's Writing Center
Did you know that there is an ad-free citation machine build into Google Doc? You can access for free, and it will even generate your in-text citations (just not the page numbers). Check it out!
Litcharts is a great resource if you are new to navigating the works of Shakespeare. The website offers the original full-text of most of Shakespeare’s plays with modern translations on a parallel screen. The lines are color-coded, which makes it easy to read and compare the two versions of the text. Additionally, you can get the act, scene, and line number by hovering over any piece of text. It also gives you the full reference for the webpage, just in case you’d like to use any of their modern translations in a paper. Check it out!
Shakespeare Translations at LitCharts
Other Resources
Student Sample Papers | An Annotated Student Sample Paper |
Common Issues in Philosophy Papers | Examples of What Not To Do |
Strong Writing vs. Poor Writing
in Philosophy Papers |
Examples of Student Writing |
Other Tools and Resources
Student Sample Papers | An Annotated Sample Paper with Essential Components in Footnotes
An Annotated Sample Paper with Essential Elements in Comment Boxes |
Paired Samples | This website annotates the rhetorical appeals in the original text and then it shows the final essay. |
Graphic Organizer | A table to keep track of rhetorical elements as you read. |
Academic Word Lists
Most freshmen find out the hard way that academia feels like a whole new language, and while it’s technically still English, the scholar-specific vocabulary may be unfamiliar and difficult to navigate. Terms that are common topics of conversation in college classrooms—like ideology, cognitive, intrinsic, longitudinal, seminal, and salient—may pose barriers. It may be even more difficult for students to adopt this academic language into their own writing. For that reason, we recommend you check out this webpage. Try not to get overwhelmed when you click the link, because it has several word lists and it may feel like you’re scrolling forever.
However, there’s two portions of the page you should check out and explore the links:
Here you will find multiple lists of frequently used academic terminology as well as phrases, transitions, connectors, idioms, formulaic expressions, and words that are commonly used together in academic settings. It’s a wealth of knowledge, and though the webpage can be a little hard to navigate, it’s worth exploring. These terms can help you feel more comfortable with academic discourse, and they can elevate your academic writing when you weave them into your own work.
by: Eamonn X. Wizeman
As writers we face many struggles. Every time we start typing, we may start asking questions like: How do I say what I mean? What adjective best describes an object? Is this argument strong enough? Does my analysis make sense? These questions sneak up on everyone, and you’re not alone when you ask them. We’d all prefer that we could just write without these problems facing us at every turn, and while we cannot completely avoid them, the remedy to writer’s block often comes before we even start to think about what we write.
Reading is a vital skill for everyone, a fact that people often forget. We cannot write without the ability to understand what we are writing about. However, this comes with its own problems. As one’s academic career progresses it may be common to find journal articles or textbooks with confusing language. Perhaps it is too wordy or there are words that you do not yet know. Whatever the problem may be, there are tools to help.
One of these tools is a website called Rewordify. Rewordify allows you to copy and paste a paragraph that you are having trouble comprehending and will break down words that are difficult to understand. For example, a sentence that uses the word “defamation” will be replaced with the phrase “saying lies that hurt someone else’s reputation.” This defines what defamation is but does so in a manner that fits it into the text. By breaking down bigger words, Rewordify can help a reader understand lengthy articles about topics that have a lot of vocabulary that they are not familiar with. Further, Rewordify will generate vocabulary quizzes for students looking to expand their horizons. This can help students improve their lexicon, which in turn improves their writing.
A tool like this can be useful for people, such as myself, who often find themselves re-reading the same paragraph several times. Reading comprehension is the first step in writing and is an integral part to the formation of ideas on any topic. If you cannot understand what an article, book, or study is about, Rewordify is a mechanism that can help you comprehend confusing text, which is a skill that is vital to pristine writing.
Check it out: Rewordify
As Biology and Philosophy double majors in SJLA, we have gained experience writing both scientific and humanity-based papers; however, we recognize that transitioning between the two often can be difficult. We would like to provide a guide on how to tackle this task. While it is true that the two writing styles vastly differ in some regards, they also share similarities! As in all writing, it is important to have a clear purpose, and thus, pick a specific topic to discuss. For example, rather than writing about Plato’s Symposium in its entirety, the specific topic of Eros (Love) in the Symposium can be analyzed. Similarly, rather than writing about cells in general, the specific topic of embryonic stem cells can be researched.
When writing scientifically, it is important to have succinct sentences and strong verbs that convey the topic at hand. Although long and flowy sentences may sound better from the writer’s perspective, such a structure may force readers to analyze each sentence multiple times before they grasp the true meaning! Therefore, it is essential that sentences only include information that is necessary for properly interpreting the topic. Including and referencing experimental and statistical data also improves a scientific paper, for readers can better understand a topic when evidence is provided. In scientific writing, a certain format is often followed: abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. This outline allows for a smooth progression of thoughts, moving from general information about the topic to specific information about data. It is also vital to conduct research on other literature regarding the topic at hand to provide background knowledge. Doing so will increase the paper’s credibility if similar results have been obtained in other experiments. We find PubMed, Google Scholar, and Science Direct to be useful websites for obtaining peer-reviewed articles and would recommend them as a strong starting point.
Conversely, when writing in the humanities, students often have more creative liberty and can use a variety of adjectives and adverbs to convey imagery. Yet, students should also be cognizant of speaking succinctly because the inclusion of “fluffy” words or sentences detract from a paper’s purpose. Although humanities papers often display more linguistic creativity than scientific papers, it is important to recognize the fine line between words that add to versus words that take away from the paper’s message. In the humanities, a specific structure is generally utilized when writing papers: introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Just as the abstract summarizes a scientific paper, an introduction gives insight into a humanity paper’s central discussion. Thus, it is vital that papers have strong thesis statements, so readers have a clear direction. In fact, a thesis statement may cause readers to decide if they do or do not wish to continue reading your piece! Lastly, resources, such as the library’s database and collection of books, along with Google Scholar, are helpful for humanities papers. We also find Purdue’s OWL’s Sample Papers to be an extremely helpful resource for better understanding how to properly format a paper.
As always, it is important not to worry oneself when writing a paper or to overthink when starting the writing process. We always find it helpful to write down preliminary ideas and goals for a paper in the format of an outline. Doing so allows us to have a clear focus regarding the paper’s topic and helps the writing process to go much more smoothly. At The Writing Center, we have benefitted from making appointments with other writing consultants to help with our own papers. As such, we understand the importance of helping other people with their writing too. If you are ever having trouble starting, working on, or finishing a paper, The Writing Center has numerous resources to help!
Good luck and happy writing!
There’s certain conventions that you need to know when analyzing a short story or comparing literary works by the same author. For example, you need to know how to write the title: is it in quotes? Is it italicized? Are you using a long quote or a short quote when inserting the text? Do you know how to cite it? Are you writing an analysis opposed to a plot summary? Do you know what tense to use when describing actions that occurred in the work? There’s a lot of rules!
Here’s the Golden Rules When Writing About Literature:
Here’s a detailed handout with examples of how to use these rules.
It’s one of my personal favorites. It provides excellent examples of summary and analysis paragraphs. It also gives you examples of strong thesis statements for literary papers, and it demonstrates a variety of in-text citations with MLA format. I strongly recommend you check it out before you write your next English paper.
Other Tools and Resources:
Student Sample Essays | Student Sample Essay Paragraph-by-Paragraph |
Student Sample Essays on Poetry Analysis | Student Sample Paper |
Upper Level Student Sample Essays | A Compilation of Student Sample Papers from the 200-400 Level Literature Courses |
Graphic Organizer for Literary Analysis | Multiple Graphic Organizers |
A research log is a tool to help you organize, analyze, and evaluate sources as you begin to gather information about a topic. It typically consists of a table with labels across the top that serve as a set of instructions when approaching a new source. Filling out each column helps you gather the information you need for your project. For example, you’ll need to include the full-citation in your research log, which will allow to to copy and paste the full citation into your completed draft later. You also need to include what makes the source credible, so you’ll remember to check if it’s peer-reviewed or scholarly. That information will become important later as you determine which of your sources should be included in your draft based off their relevance and credibility. Perhaps you’ll have some sources in the log that support your argument, but they come from low quality sources. Comparing the credibility will help you make those choices. Most importantly, a research log lets you place all of your evidence in one spot so can easily compare data from each source. The table will ensure that you don’t confuse your sources or accidentally plagiarize by crediting a fact to a different source. Finally, there’s a space for you to analyze the evidence in the log and link it to your main argument.
There’s two major reasons for using a research log :
1.) It will keep you organized. Rather than jotting notes in a notebook, filling in the required information for each column in a research log will ensure you’ve collected the needed information before moving on to the next source. You won’t have to keep returning to previous sources or struggle to remember how you found a source because your search terms and databases are in the log. You’ll also never lose a source or forget where a quote came from.
2) It will help you compare your evidence. Having the evidence from all of the sources in one place lets you look at the data side-by-side to evaluate which items would be best to include in your paper. Looking at all of the evidence in a research log can also help you refine your thesis before you begin drafting.
If you have to write a paper that requires research, this tool can save you a significant amount of time, and it could eliminate stress later on in your writing process.
Here’s a template for a Research Log
It’s time to abandon the simple “First” , “Second”, “Finally,” and “In conclusion” transition words from high school. It’s no longer acceptable to have “and” twice in a single sentence or “also” twice in the same paragraph. You instead need words, phrases, and constructions that not only transition your thoughts, but that reflect the relationships between your ideas. Listed below is my favorite list of transitions sorted by the relationships they express.
The Best Quick List of Transitions and Conjunctions Sorted by Type
This next list is another one of my favorites. It’s less colorful, but significantly more extensive. It also includes more academic transitions, and it has longer transitional phrases. It’s three full pages of transitions by type. Just be sure to look up sample constructions–not all of these words can just be inserted into a sentence. For example “embark” is used very differently in a sentence than “commencing with”
The Best Extensive List with Some Uncommon Transitions Sorted by Purpose
This next resource is a chart of common transitions in the “word” form and in the “phrase” form with examples of how to use them effectively in sentence constructions. All of these words are included in the previous two worksheets, but this particular resource is useful if you need to convert a one-word transition into a phrase to emphasize a point. Sometimes writers use full phrases to transition between larger ideas (or paragraphs) and single word transitions to move between little ideas (like individual pieces of evidence). It doesn’t provide a lot of examples, but it shows how to use each in a sentence correctly with punctuation, which is beneficial.
Samples of Word Transitions Converted to Phrase Transitions with Examples
© 2024 Scranton Writes
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑