Resources || University Writing

Tagged Entries: Research 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

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

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 

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

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 

Scientific posters communicate research in a visually engaging way and can be paired with an oral presentation or audience discussion. Posters can be designed for other experts in your field or for interdisciplinary or general audiences who are outside of your field. In either case, it’s important to critically consider your audience, purpose, content, and layout. Use the resources below to plan, draft, and assess your scientific poster.

Materials designed by Katharine H. Brown, Amy Cicchino, and Carly Cummings

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

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 

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

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