Tagged Entries: Brainstorming

Taking on a creative work can be daunting. Whether you are gearing up for NaNoWriMo or looking for year-round support, these resources will help you work through the writing process for endeavors such as novels, novellas, and short stories. Specifically, these documents are useful for brainstorming, drafting, and organizing ideas for premise, plot, point of view, characters, worldbuilding, and dialogue. You will also learn scene blocking techniques and tips for finishing and revising your first draft.  

Materials designed by Autumn Frederick and Heesun Yoon 

 

This worksheet introduces you to premise, provides a breakdown of premise components, and helps you draft your own premise

This worksheet reviews two types of story structure: the Three Act Structure and Freytag’s Pyramid. Space is provided to help you map your story out in both structures to decide which best fits your writing style

This worksheet discusses five points of view found in creative writing, notes tips for helping writers select a point of view, provides resources for writing and reading for diversity, lists questions to consider for character creation, and provides fillable character profiles

This worksheet provides planning resources, an overview and list of decisions, and activity for delving into worldbuilding

This handout breaks down tips for improving your descriptive writing and provides examples and explanations for each suggestion

This brief handout provides an explanation of what dialogue is and how it is formatted and provides space for practice

This brief worksheet defines scene blocking and provides an activity for practice

This brief handout lists good habits for finishing your project and outlines tips and resources to aid you in revising your first draft

Tags: Audience Brainstorming Characters Creative Writing Critical Thinking Descriptive Writing Dialogue Drafting Flow Goals for Writing Large Projects Organization Outlining Plot Point of View Premise Revising Scene Blocking Summarizing Voice Worldbuilding Writing Process

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

Tags: Academic Writing Audience Brainstorming Critical Thinking Dissertation Effective Communication Graduate Students Research Writing Thesis Voice Writing Anxiety Writing Process Writing in the Disciplines Writing-to-Learn

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

Tags: Academic Writing Artificial Intelligence Brainstorming Critical Thinking Digital Ethics Technology Writing Process

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

Tags: Academic Writing Artificial Intelligence Brainstorming Dissertation Flow Graduate Students Large Projects Literature Review Organization Reading Research Writing Technology Thesis Using Evidence Working with Sources Writing Process

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 

Tags: Academic Writing Application Writing Brainstorming Graduate Students Personal Statements Reading Reflection Reflective Writing Writing Process Writing for Scholarships

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

Tags: Academic Writing Artificial Intelligence Audience Brainstorming Critical Thinking Effective Communication Feedback Flow Organization Paragraph Organization Peer Review Proofreading Research Writing Writing Process Writing in the Disciplines editing

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