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.
Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition)
When writing for publication, academic writers should follow the guidance provided by journals, which may point to academic style systems. In contexts where guidance is lacking, the Chicago Manual of Style, which takes a very detailed approach to grammar, punctuation, usage, citation, and other matters relevant to academic writers, can be consulted. When using any style guide, be aware that precise matters of writing in English are often subject to debate and that different guides will have different advice for writers.
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.
SAPIENS Public Writing Training digital booklet
This booklet guides researchers toward writing and publishing work about their research aimed at non-specialist readers. While aimed at writers in the field of anthropology, the advice is here broadly useful to scientists and engineers who want to explore science communication in a single publication or more broadly. Our former STEM Writing Specialist, Dr. Bridget Alex, served as an editor for this project.