Welcome back! Fall 2013 Edition

jjpacres / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Welcome back students (or just welcome, if you're a new MALS or ASGC student)! Now that you've survived your first week of classes, perhaps you've had time to look through those course syllabi and start getting an idea of all the different types of writing you'll be doing this semester. Once your head has stopped spinning at the thought of all that reading and writing (you can do it!!), check out the following links to help you get your semester of academic writing off to a great start.

MALS Online Writing Assistance
The MALS Writing Center has lots of online assistance available to help you with the writing process. Besides calling on your trusty writing consultant, don't forget to check out www.malswritingcenter.info for information on specific types of graduate-level writing, to Turabian style tips, to what to make of your professor's comments on your papers.

Writing Strategies
These posts from the blog Explorations of Style feature the author's "five key strategies for improving academic writing," which I think are a great to place to start, or just review, your academic writing habits: Reverse Outlines, Paragraphs, Transitions, Verbs, and Subjects.

Make Yourself Clear
Clear writing can be difficult to achieve, especially if you're new to graduate-level writing and all the concepts and ideas you'll need to communicate in your papers. Learn how to be concise in this handout from UNC's Writing Center, and read my thoughts on the topic in this previous blog post on sentence clarity.

Resource Roundup for Friday, March 1

Image from office.microsoft.com

Every now and then I’ll post a Resource Roundup here on the blog. It will feature links to articles, podcasts, and other sources useful or interesting to MALS students in your writing and research, plus tips for your current writing assignments. Here’s the first installment:

Writing mechanics tips

• Having trouble with sentence clarity? This handout from the Purdue Online Writing Center (OWL) can help. (Includes help with passive voice, parallel constructions, and transitions.) 

• For help deciphering your prof's comments on your papers, check out this MALS Writing Center link, as well as this Purdue OWL link for fixing the problems. 

• Eek! You're at the library and your copy of Turabian is at home. This quick guide comes to the rescue in a pinch. 

Good links

• Here's another argument (and some tips) for developing strong writing skills.

• This article talks about the benefits of the undergrad on-campus experience, but I think being on campus and getting involved is important for grad students, too. (Join a writing group! Check in with your writing consultant! Go to the library!) 

• Virginia Tech offers an interdisciplinary doctoral program called ASPECT. 

• This blog post poses some interesting questions about interdisciplinary research in the sciences—it reminded me of the topics some of you are covering in Joe Moran's Interdisciplinarity. What are your answers to the author's questions?