How to Use this Page
Below are resources that University Writing has developed to support students and instructors across the disciplines in their writing and writing instruction. We define writing broadly, so you will find resources on ePortfolios, visual design, professional communication, and presentations in addition to traditional writing tasks like reflective writing, literature reviews, peer review, and editing and proofing.
Please use the keywords on the right-hand side of the page or the search bar above to navigate these resources. If you would like to use these resources in your course, please follow the Creative Commons information located at the bottom of each resource. If you plan to use the source in its original format, we ask that you leave the University Writing branding intact.
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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
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
Designing Presentations in Aerospace Engineering Worksheet Word Document
Designing Presentations in Aerospace Engineering Worksheet PDF
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
Grants are a difficult genre for anyone to learn. A straightforward technical description of the proposed project simply won’t do the trick. The resources below will help you consider how to tailor your project to a request for proposals (RFP), consider your audience, and manage the process.
Materials designed by Christopher Basgier
This handout compiles common tips and advice related to grant writing
This worksheet helps you reflect on what you already know about grant writing and begin by analyzing a model excerpt from a grant
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
2018 Responding to a Practice IRB Application Scenario Word Document
2021 Responding to a Practice IRB Application Scenario Word Document
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
Using Reflection to Manage Writer’s Block and Writing Anxiety Word Document
Using Reflection to Manage Writer’s Block and Writing Anxiety PDF
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
Your personal brand is a representation of your work that tells your professional story. Taking time to reflect on and develop your personal brand can help employers, review committees, and graduate schools know who you are, what you do, and what you value. The resources below will introduce you to personal brand and help you begin to develop a personal brand statement.
Materials designed by Amy Cicchino, Layli Miron, Megan Haskins, and Lauren Schlosser
This handout explains what personal brand is and why it matters
Once you’ve reviewed the Personal Brand Handout above, use this worksheet to help you begin drafting your personal brand statement
This handout moves to a larger scale, aiding in the creation of mission and vision statements focused towards student organizations
This worksheet helps faculty and staff consider their professional brand and develop a brand statement
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
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
Writing Research Abstracts in the College of Human Sciences Handout and Worksheet Word Document
Writing Research Abstracts in the College of Human Sciences Handout and Worksheet PDF
This worksheet will help you analyze example abstracts from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds
Writing Effective Research Abstracts across the Disciplines Handout and Worksheet Word Document
Writing Effective Research Abstracts across the Disciplines Handout and Worksheet PDF
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
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
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
