Writing Process

Realize Your Creative Potential

Develop effective writing habits, think rhetorically, organize, invent, format, edit, revise, and publish.  Understand when to play the believing game versus the doubting game.  Adopt the working habits and attitudes of effective writers.

Information Literacy

Navigate Your Personal Learning Networks

Don't get fooled!  Critically evaluate texts, images, and new media.  Consult Information Literacy to become a more active and more informed reader of visual and written texts. Check out our Critical Reading Practices and suite of critical reading exercises.  When reading, evaluate rhetorical appeals and be critical of how writers put sources in conversation with one another.

Research Methods & Methodologies

Consult the research primer to understand why different disciplines use divergent research methods. Learn the conventions of textual research for guidelines of evaluating, citing, and summarizing sources. Explore empirical research,including interviews, surveys,and ethnographies. Once writers have conducted their research, they must incorporate their findings into their papers.

Collaboration

Being a successful collaborator is crucial to success

Get the most out of peer review and teacher feedback: Check out our Peer Review and Feedback guidelines. Not sure how to offer critical feedback on your peers' documents?  Check out our Common Comments.  You can paste these on to your peers' documents and then they can find immediate follow-up help at Writing Commons.

Genres

Address specific audiences and purposes

Explore genres of documents produced by writers from different disciplinary communities: Academic Writing, Creative Writing, Business Writing and Communication, Technical Writing, Professional Writing, and Public Speaking.

New Media

Beyond the Book

Copyright Law, Remediation, Digital Ethics, Online Forums, Fan Fiction, and Blogs—these are some of the features that distinguish new media genres from traditional print texts that have been published online. To be classified as "new media writing," a text needs to break free from the boundaries of text-based prose.

Duke University

English Composition I: Achieving Expertise

Writing Commons would like to welcome all participants of Duke University's "English Composition I: Achieving Expertise" offered on Coursera!

Ohio State

Writing II: Rhetorical Composing

Rhetorical Composing engages you in a series of interactive reading, research, and composing activities along with assignments designed to help you become more effective consumers and producers of alphabetic, visual and multimodal texts.