Academic Writing Resources Outside Caltech

The internet is full of advice for writers, and it varies in quality. A curated list of high quality resources for academic writers is offered below.

Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab)

The Purdue Writing Lab's website is well known and much used for a reason. It offers clear, accurate, up-to-date information about many fundamental topics in academic writing. Purdue OWL is a good resource for thorough answers to questions about grammar and punctuation. It offers details and models of academic citation in the major styles often used in undergraduate courses, APA, MLA, Chicago Style, IEEE, and AMA. Multilingual students who are English language learners or for whom English is a second (or third, etc.) language may find their resources for this audience useful. It also contains many resources on subject-specific writing and job search writing, among other topics.

The University of North Carolina's (UNC) Tips and Tools for Writers

UNC's writing center offers a particularly broad array of resources for academic writers. It's useful that the full array of resources is easily viewed on a single webpage, which will help writers quickly see if the topic they are interested in is covered.

Harvard's Brief Guides to Writing in the Disciplines

Harvard's writing center offers some particularly useful guides to academic writing in the fields of English, history, philosophy, and psychology.

The WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) Clearinghouse

The WAC Clearinghouse, hosted by Colorado State University, offers an impressive array of resources on writing writing across the curriculum. Many of these resources are aimed at faculty and address how to teach writing; Caltech grads and postdocs who are applying for faculty jobs might consult this site to gather resources on how to create writing assignments for students in STEM courses. The site also has a page of resources for writers that includes sections on writing in engineering and writing in the sciences. The site also contains a plethora of scholarly resources for those who study the teaching and learning of writing.