Writing practice using the OWL at Purdue

The Owl at Purdue is a very useful resource for students who would like to improve their writing skills. Below is a summary, taken from their web page, of the services and information that they provide.

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

The entire website is filled with useful tips, tutorials and examples to help you improve your writing. Here is a list of links that might be particularly useful to ESL students preparing for exams or trying to improve their academic writing skills.

Using capital letters

This handout lists some guidelines for capitalization. If you have a question about whether a specific word should be capitalized that doesn’t fit under one of these rules, try checking a dictionary to see if the word is capitalized there.

Using apostrophes

This resource explains and demonstrates the three main ways to use an apostrophe.

How to use articles (a, an and the)

This resource discusses the differences between indefinite articles (a/an) and definite articles (the).

Using punctuation marks

This resource explains and demonstrates how to use commas, semicolons, colons, parenthesis, dashes, quotation marks and italics

Sentence punctuation patterns

This resource describes eight sentence punctuation patterns with examples.

Common spelling errors

This resource covers common spelling errors including accept/except, ei/ie, noun plurals, and –ible/able.

Subject verb agreement

Ever get “subject/verb agreement” as an error on a paper? This handout will help you understand this common grammar problem.

Writing essays for exams

While most OWL resources recommend a longer writing process (start early, revise often, conduct thorough research, etc.), sometimes you just have to write quickly in test situations. However, these exam essays can be no less important pieces of writing than research papers because they can influence final grades for courses, and/or they can mean the difference between getting into an academic program (GED, SAT, GRE). To that end, this resource will help you prepare and write essays for exams.

How to paraphrase

This resource explains what paraphrasing is and why it is a useful skill. It also explains how to paraphrase and gives some examples of paraphrasing for you to compare.