Tagged Entries: Academic Writing

Academic writing is a unique type of writing and can vary across disciplines. Use these materials to better understand the elements of academic writing, such as voice, disciplinary writing, and college-level writing. Reading academic sources is an important part of learning how to write in your discipline. For tips on how to engage with reading these sources, see our section on Reading Difficult Materials 

Materials designed by Colby Axelberd, Christopher Basgier, Katharine Brown, Amy Cicchino, Clare Hancock, Megan Haskins, James Truman, and Livi Welch

This worksheet is designed to help incoming first-year college students learn a bit about writing at the college level. There are also scenarios where students can consider what they would do in difficult writing situations 


The handout breaks down some implicit expectations related to academic voice, such as when and how to use first-person writing, jargon, style, and sentence variation 


This worksheet invites you to revise a piece of writing by paying attention to its voice within a sample paragraph 


This brief handout provides some examples of academic voice from various disciplines 


This worksheet provides excerpts from disciplinary writing and asks participants to guess the disciplinary context for the writing. By doing this, we hope you will begin to see how different disciplines structure and style their writing 


This worksheet invites writers to consider the rhetorical situation of a genre and plan their writing within that genre

 

 This worksheet helps you apply reading like a writer to your work by inviting you to examine written artifacts from a writerly perspective by paying attention to features like structure, key terms, signposting, and verb use


This worksheet is meant to help graduate students approach writing their first manuscript by making explicit options for manuscript section organization and looking at examples 


This handout invites readers to compare an excerpt from a dissertation to an excerpt of the same material, rewritten for nonspecialist or "general" audiences


This handout invites extension professionals to reflect on the kinds of academic and non-academic genres the produce in their positions.


This worksheet invites writers to plan a piece of writing for a general audience by leading them through the elements of the rhetorical situation


This worksheet guides you through developing an argument and countering opposing arguments with a focus on claims, reasoning, and impact

This resource provides helpful information for students writing in a foreign language. Though writing in another language comes with its obstacles, it also yields many benefits that can lead to deeper learning and an elevated relationship with language

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications like ChatGPT offer new opportunities and challenges for teachers and for students. The documents in this section offer guidance on how to respond to AI in ways that center thinking and communication.  

Materials designed by Christopher Basgier and Muhammad Umer

 

This document represents University Writing’s most up-to-date guidelines for faculty response to AI. It is organized according to four modes of response: prohibition, permission, pedagogy, and engagement

This document represents University Writing's most up-to-date information and guidance for students on AI. It defines artificial intelligence, describes large language models like ChatGPT, and guides students in deciding when and how to use AI in their courses

This handout suggests ways in which writers can practice critical thinking while using generative artificial intelligence

This worksheet invites users to plan the elements of a successful prompt for generative artificial intelligence

This document is a sample conversation with ChatGPT that illustrates how an iterative prompting process can be used to create lesson plans

This handout helps students plan literature reviews by using selected examples of AI tools

In order to effectively share our research findings with others, we must be able to deliver presentations clearly and impactfully. These resources include tips about oral and visual communication as well as visual design principles that will help engage and inform your audience. 

Materials designed by Colby Axelberd, Christopher Basgier, Katharine H. Brown, Amy Cicchino, Carly Cummings, Megan Haskins, Layli Miron, Annie Small, Heather Stuart, and Parker Wade 

This brief handout outlines elements of oral communication 

Once you have a draft of your oral presentation, this peer review worksheet can help you self-assess or get feedback 

This handout will help you decide the best way to visually represent your data 

This handout introduces you to four principles for visual design: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity 

This worksheet is meant to help you put together a presentation. It has been designed for students in aerospace engineering 

This handout will introduce you to scientific posters and analyze example posters

This worksheet will help you self-assess a draft of your scientific poster or gather feedback from a peer

This worksheet is designed to help you articulate how you “see” visible materials and what you expect students to do with visible materials in your courses 

This document outlines ways of managing nonverbal mechanics, including the upper and lower body, with attention to accessibility for speakers with disabilities

To conduct human-based research, you need approval from Auburn’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). These resources will help you learn about IRB applications and offer tips for creating clear, effective IRB materials.  

Materials designed by Lucus Adelino, Christopher Basgier, Amy Cicchino, and Niki Johnson

This handout will define terms that appear in the IRB application form.  

Writing a successful IRB protocol is more than just filling out the form; it requires dutiful attention to your audience and your purpose. This handout has tips to help you write your IRB protocols more effectively 

These practice worksheets help you review and give feedback on a sample IRB scenario. By analyzing these samples, we hope you learn strategies for writing and revising your own application and protocols

This worksheet will help you give feedback to someone else’s IRB protocol

Learn more about Auburn’s IRB by visiting their website, which contains guidelines, application forms, sample information letters and consent documents, and more. 

A literature review is an evaluation of the available literature on a given subject. In literature reviews, you are synthesizing and analyzing research to tell a story about the work done about a topic and how it relates to present and future research. Use the resources below for guidance as your write your literature review. 

Materials designed by Katharine Brown, Autumn Frederick, Layli Miron, and Muhammad Umer 

This worksheet helps you begin identifying scholarly conversations by analyzing an example literature review 

This worksheet helps you analyze an example literature review to identify the storytelling elements being used  

This worksheet parallels the moves a writer makes when creating a literature review with Freytag’s pyramid. It guides writers in outlining their own literature reviews by answering a series of brainstorming questions

This handout helps students plan literature reviews by using selected examples of AI tools

Large writing projects, such as dissertations, theses, and research papers, can be daunting. Use these resources to assist you with organizational and time management strategies needed to finish your project. Be sure to see our resources on The Writing Process as you engage in this work.  

Materials designed by G. Travis Adams, Katharine Brown, Amy Cicchino, Megan Haskins, Annie Small, and James Truman 

This handout provides strategies for approaching large writing projects 

This worksheet has tips and reflective questions to help you begin a large writing project 

This worksheet introduces you to and helps you begin creating writing goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. 

This handout offers you strategies to developing a regular writing routine 

This handout shares strategies for tracking your writing progress, like wordcount trackers, accountability logs, and goal planning 

This worksheet can be used to create a weekly writing schedule 

This handout invites writers to reflect on their academic identity, celebrate writing successes, and plan their next steps in their large writing project

This brief writing prompt helps writers plan how to use their time productively in a writing session

This worksheet provides two brief writing prompts to use as a warm-up as well as recognize and celebrate moments of growth in writing skills

This writing warm-up encourages writers to affirm their readiness for writing through identifying the strengths they bring to the project

This writing warm-up invites writers to reflect on a semester's worth of writing and recognize moments of growth

The writing process can be stressful, and it is easy to feel anxious about writing, struggle to start writing, or lose focus while writing. Use these resources to implement mindfulness strategies such as meditative pauses, progress tracking, and reflective journaling into your writing routine.   

Materials designed by G. Travis Adams, Christopher Basgier, Katharine Brown, Michael Cook, and Annie Small 

This brief handout describes writer’s block and explains its causes 

This brief worksheet explains solutions to writer’s block and a short reflective writing prompts to help you begin overcoming your own writer’s block 

This is a handout useful for instructors as they help students navigate writer's block

This longer worksheet explains some of the causes of writer’s block and writing anxiety, and it offers reflective prompts you can use to manage writing challenges 

This handout describes the meditative pause, or brief moments in which you deliberately stop writing and check in with your body, your breath, and your mind, before returning to write 

The following meditation script, “Focus into Breathing,” can be used before you write as a way of slowing down a busy mind and focusing attention 

This activity helps you recognize your patterns of thought about writing and replace self-defeating thoughts with empowering ones to reduce the occurrence of writer’s block and writing anxiety 

This activity combines Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and contemplative and embodied pedagogies to help writers externalize and silence an overly harsh inner critic

This brief writing prompt helps writers plan how to use their time productively in a writing session

This worksheet guides you in using expressive writing for self-discovery. You will learn about different types of expressive writing, such as answering prompts or making gratitude lists, and can complete several reflective prompts.

This worksheet provides two brief writing prompts to use as a warm-up as well as to recognize and celebrate moments of growth in writing skills

This writing warm-up encourages writers to affirm their readiness for writing through identifying the strengths they bring to the project

This writing warm-up invites writers to reflect on a semester's worth of writing and recognize moments of growth

Use these handouts and resources to understand the difference between quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing as well as when to use each technique. 

Materials designed by Christopher Basgier, Katharine Brown, Amy Cicchino, and Megan Haskins

This worksheet will help you practice paraphrasing 

This worksheet will help you write an annotation for a source for an annotated bibliography 

This worksheet introduces you to the Chicago Style standard of writing and helps you practice paraphrasing and summarizing in Chicago

This worksheet gets writers considering how to paraphrase and summarize a source 

This activity asks you to consider whether or not something is plagiarized 

This handout provides an easy reference list of common transitional words and phrases 

Personal statements are often part of the application process for prestigious scholarships and graduate or professional school applications. Use these resources to identify your goals and the expectations of your audience so that you can craft an effective personal statement. If you are applying for a Fulbright grant, please also see our resources specific to Fulbright.  

Materials designed by Katharine Brown, Emily Cosgrove, Annie Small, and James Truman  

This toolkit introduces personal statements and offers step for producing an effective personal statement 

This worksheet will guide you in analyzing an example personal statement 

These open response questions will help you brainstorm and pre-write for your personal statement 

Once you have brainstormed, this worksheet will help you outline your personal statement 

This worksheet will help you reflect and self-assess a personal statement draft to consider opportunities for revision 

Often, new professionals encounter unfamiliar or complicated communication situations. These resources will give you strategies for analyzing and responding to situations like creating professional plans and protocols, drafting an inquiry email, and polishing your professional writing. 

Materials designed by G. Travis Adams, Lucas de Almedia Adelino, Christopher Basgier, Jordan Beckum, Layli Miron, and James Truman

This handout will help you identify the rhetorical situation—or the purpose, role, audience, resources and constraints—of professional communication situations 

This activity invites you to participate in a realistic workplace scenario involving written communication  

This worksheet will help you apply the paramedic method of editing to improve sentence-level clarity 

This handout offers strategies for working with writing at its proofing or near-final revision stage of development 

Carefully and critically reading is an important part of being a successful student and professional. Reading can help you understand important information and learn more about how a particular kind of writing is created.  

Materials designed by Christopher Basgier, Katharine Brown, Margaret J. Marshall, and James Truman 

This handout guides you through “reading like a writer,” an analysis strategy developed to help you think about the choices the writer made 

This worksheet helps you apply reading like a writer to your work by inviting you to examine written artifacts from a writerly perspective by paying attention to features like structure, key terms, signposting, and verb use

This handout provides you with tools you can use to make sense of difficult reading material by engaging in active reading 

This worksheet will help you make important observations about a text before you begin reading it by previewing 

This handout gives a broad overview of academic scholarship and strategies that you can use to actively read the major parts of an academic research publication 

This worksheet introduces you to a says/does outline, which can help you understand why and how a writer communicates their ideas 

One type of academic writing is research abstracts, which are important distillations of academic research. In many fields, they are used as conference proposals, and they appear in journal articles to help readers understand the research and decide if they want to read further. Use these materials to better understand research abstracts and begin creating your own research abstracts. 

Materials designed by Christopher Basgier, Layli Miron, and Megan Moeller 

This handout introduces you to abstracts, or the summaries that typically begin a kind of research writing 

This resource was designed to introduce readers to abstracts within the College of Human Sciences, in fields such as Nutrition, Hospitality Management, Consumer and Design Sciences, Human Development and Family Science, and Global Education 

This worksheet will help you analyze example abstracts from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds 

This worksheet features four abstracts accepted into Auburn’s 2018 Research Symposium, which you can analyze to identify the six components of an abstract 

Many styles of academic writing require synthesis, or the process of representing relationships among multiple sources, including patterns of similarity and contrast. These materials introduce synthesis, provide select examples, and offer strategies for identifying opportunities for synthesis in your current research project. 

Materials designed by Christopher Basgier and Heather Stuart 

This handout offers tools and examples for identifying synthesis strategies that writers use in different academic disciplines. 

This worksheet is a synthesis matrix, designed to help you create and see connections across sources 

The Writing SySTEM, a project funded by the National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education program (award number 2224967), equips graduate student writers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields with the skills and resources needed to succeed in their writing projects. The materials in this section address some of the unique features and challenges of writing in STEM. 

Materials designed in collaboration by Sushil Adhikari, Christopher Basgier, Katharine Brown, Jordan Harshman, Jeff LaMondia, and Russell Mailen 

This handout will guide new and experienced researchers in how to effectively find relevant, peer-reviewed research publications using intentional search strategies and online databases. 

This section contains resources for getting started on your writing and revising your writing over time for effective organization, flow, transitions, and editing and proofreading.

Materials designed by Christopher Basgier, Jordan Beckum, Katharine Brown, Amy Cicchino, Souji Gopalakrishna Pillai, and James Truman

This worksheet helps you apply reading like a writer to your work by inviting you to examine written artifacts from a writerly perspective by paying attention to features like structure, key terms, signposting, and verb use

This handout offers strategies and techniques for generating and organizing writing ideas

This handout breaks down the writing concept of “flow” at the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level

This handout provides an overview of strategies that different writers have found helpful as they make global changes to their writing

This handout provides an overview of useful strategies for making global revisions to a manuscript and an action plan

This handout invites readers to compare an excerpt from a dissertation to an excerpt of the same material, rewritten for nonspecialist or "general" audiences

This worksheet invites writers to plan a piece of writing for a general audience by leading them through the elements of the rhetorical situation.

This handout provides an easy reference list of common transitional words and phrases

This handout explains the difference between proofing and revision processes

This worksheet will help you apply the paramedic method of editing to improve sentence-level clarity

This worksheet lets you practice applying editing and proofreading strategies to sample text through two activities

This handout suggests ways in which writers can practice critical thinking while using generative artificial intelligence

This worksheet invites users to plan the elements of a successful prompt for generative artificial intelligence

This worksheet allows you to consider how you will communicate your research in conference presentations and journal articles

This worksheet offers open-ended questions to identify ways to transform a conference presentation into a journal article. By using these questions, one can develop an editing plan and structure for the article

There is no one “right” way to organize a thesis or dissertation, which is part of what makes writing one challenging. Use these resources to help guide you as you make decisions regarding organization structure and argument development for your thesis or dissertation. To learn more about formatting your thesis or dissertation, contact the Graduate School. Also check out our section on research writing.  

Materials designed by G. Travis Adams and Carly Cummings

This brief handout explains the different parts of a thesis or dissertation 

This handout guides students through the process of outlining and developing the sections of scientific theses and dissertations

As writers, we often draw on existing research and writing to support our arguments and frame our research. Citation styles help students, faculty, and scholars attribute and discuss existing research in a specific discipline. The resources below will introduce you to ethical source use and citation styles, including APA and MLA (two of the more common citation styles).   

Materials designed by G. Travis Adams, Christopher Basgier, Amy Cicchino, Carly Cummings, Megan Haskins, Lexi Jacobs, Heather Stuart, and James Truman

This brief handout gives strategies and resources for two common citation styles, MLA and APA 

This resource provides detailed information on how to cite and write in APA style. Writers will learn how to organize their work and develop in-text and formal reference lists according to APA.

This worksheet introduces you to the Chicago Style standard of writing and helps you practice paraphrasing and summarizing in Chicago

This handout offers a brief guide to American Political Science Association (APSA) style, which focuses on citing government documents. It is used by writers in political science and law.

This handout explains how graduate student writing uses sources 

This handout introduces you to research, summary, paraphrase, quotation, attribution, citation, and citation systems 

This worksheet gets writers considering how to paraphrase and summarize a source 

This worksheet will help you write an annotation for a source for an annotated bibliography 

This handout introduces the idea of plagiarism and its various types. Further, it recommends strategies to faculty on how plagiarism can be avoided by using techniques such as timely peer review, feedback, and effective paraphrasing 

This activity asks you to consider whether or not something is plagiarized 

As writers within the sphere of building science, building construction, construction engineering, and construction management, these handouts and worksheets can be utilized to help you effectively communicate in your discipline. 

Materials designed by Muhammad Umer 

This handout introduces various types of data visualizations, explains their expected data types, and offers tips to make these visualizations appealing. 

This handout complements the above handout, “Data Visualization Made Beautiful: Techniques and Best Practices,” and provides exercises to practice data visualization. It concludes with a self-test on the relevant concepts.   

A successful writing group can help you take personal accountability for your writing progress and give you a support network of other writers. Writing groups can help you create a writing routine, give and receive feedback on your writing, and help you talk through writing blocks.  

Materials designed by Katharine Brown, Amy Cicchino, Megan Haskins, Margaret Marshall, and Annie Small 

This handout will introduce you to writing groups and offer some considerations for you as you organize your own writing group 

This worksheet introduces you to and helps you begin creating writing goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound 

This handout offers you strategies to developing a regular writing routine 

This handout shares strategies for tracking your writing progress, like wordcount trackers, accountability logs, and goal planning 

This worksheet can help your writing group determine what progress looks like for you and track that progress. 

This worksheet can be used to create a weekly writing schedule 

This reflective, discussion-based activity invites writers to evaluate their growth and discuss with group members areas of desired growth

This group conversation starter invites each group member to identify one writing skill of which they are proud and share it with the group

This activity invites writing groups to compose a letter to each other sharing how the writing group has been of support