No matter what your ability level is as a writer, there are always times when you need some quick writing advice. Perhaps you’ve received professor comments on your paper like “weak transitions” or “faulty parallelism,” and you’re wondering “what the heck does that mean?” Or maybe you’ve just received a writing prompt for an “expository essay,” and you don’t know how to start. Back in my day you’d have to purchase expensive handbooks and style guides, but today there are a variety of excellent sites, all run by top of the line university writing programs, that give the answers to your questions at a click of the mouse.
That’s purpose of the “Writers’ Resources” link category. As I find helpful sites, I’ll post them for your use. Whether you are having problems with grammar and punctuation, structure, thesis development, or research and citation, these sites contain the right advice.
OWL @ Purdue (which stands for Online Writing Lab) has been around the longest, and covers the most categories. Not only do they provide helpful advice, but they also have exercises that you can practice on, and PowerPoint presentations that you can download.
Dartmouth’s Writing Tools has a long list of specific advice on writing the academic essay. Some of this parallel’s OWL @ Purdue’s, but Dartmouth gets more specific in achieving the standard conventions within the Academy.
The Chris Brogan site lists advice on writing rhetorically effective blogs. While he focuses on business and marketing, I believe that his points can easily be translated to academic blogging as well.