OWL Coming Soon: A new look for our same great content! We're working hard this summer on a redesign of the Purdue OWL. Worry not! Our navigation menu and content will remain largely the same. If you are having trouble locating a specific resource, please visit the search page or the Site Map. 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. For more information about services for the Purdue University community, including one-to-one consultations, ESL conversation groups and workshops, please visit the Writing Lab site. Mission The Purdue University Writing Lab and Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) assist clients in their development as writers—no matter what their skill level—with on-campus consultations, online participation, and community engagement.
How to write better essays: 'nobody does introductions properly' | Education As the government begins its crackdown on essay mill websites, it’s easy to see just how much pressure students are under to get top grades for their coursework these days. But writing a high-scoring paper doesn’t need to be complicated. We spoke to experts to get some simple techniques that will raise your writing game. Tim Squirrell is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and is teaching for the first time this year. “There is a knack to it,” he says. Poke holes The goal of writing any essay is to show that you can think critically about the material at hand (whatever it may be). “You need to be using your higher cognitive abilities,” says Bryan Greetham, author of the bestselling How to Write Better Essays. But what does critical evaluation actually look like? “That can be an intimidating idea,” he says. Critique your own arguments Once you’ve cast a critical eye over the texts, you should turn it back on your own arguments. Fine, use Wikipedia then Focus your reading
What is Historical Thinking? Watch this introductory video (or download the transcript) for an overview of ways of thinking inherent in knowing and doing history. Historical thinking is complex and multi-faceted; we focus on five key aspects particularly relevant to the K-12 classroom. These are: Multiple Accounts & PerspectivesAnalysis of Primary SourcesSourcingContextClaim-evidence Connection What resources are available to help with understanding these facets and teaching them to students of all ages? Below are a few of our favorite such resources at Teachinghistory.org. Multiple Accounts & Perspectives The textbook’s account is the one that students encounter most frequently and routinely in their history classrooms. Explore our Lesson Plan Review section to find exemplar lessons for every grade level that use multiple accounts. Analysis of Primary Sources Using multiple accounts highlights the necessity of analyzing those accounts and students need explicit instruction in how to analyze primary sources. Sourcing
Science Writer Welcome to CAST Science Writer, the tool that supports students in writing lab and class reports. This tool is geared toward middle school and high school students. Check out the supports and help available in Science Writer described below. Or click the "Take a Tour" button above to see how Science Writer works. A Report Structure All parts of a science or lab report are broken into small steps so the author can concentrate on one part of the report at a time. A Process for Writing Science Writer helps you through the process of draft, revise, and edit when writing a science report. Sentence Starters The "Help Me Get Started" button has two functions (1) it divides the writing into smaller sections and (2) provides sentence starters when on the draft screens in the writing process. Checklists Checklists are available when you revise and edit your science report. Journal This is a place in Science Writer where you may write notes, reflect, make comments or questions, or keep track of data.
History in Dispute: Charlottesville and Confederate Monuments | Teaching with the News | Brown University Teaching with the News Objectives Students will: Understand the idea of historical memory. Contextualize recent events in Charlottesville within a larger historical controversy. Note to Teachers Remind students that conversations about events in Charlottesville and commemorations of the Confederacy will likely raise issues related to racism and power, which can be emotional. We encourage teachers to consider carefully the dynamics of their classrooms as they prepare to use these materials. You should also read and view all sources before sharing them with students to be sure that they are appropriate for your classroom. Finally, it is important to remind students that this lesson will not cover all aspects of the Charlottesville events. We recommend teaching this lesson over the course of two or more class periods. Handouts “Introduction—The Charlottesville Protests” “Video Worksheet: Historical Memory” “Media Source Set” “Analyzing Your Sources” Videos Short video introduction In the Classroom:
What Does It Mean to Think Historically? Introduction When we started working on Teachers for a New Era, a Carnegie-sponsored initiative designed to strengthen teacher training, we thought we knew a thing or two about our discipline. As we began reading such works as Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, however, we encountered an unexpected challenge.1 If our understandings of the past constituted a sort of craft knowledge, how could we distill and communicate habits of mind we and our colleagues had developed through years of apprenticeship, guild membership, and daily practice to university students so that they, in turn, could impart these habits in K–12 classrooms? In response, we developed an approach we call the "five C's of historical thinking." Change over Time The idea of change over time is perhaps the easiest of the C's to grasp. Students often find the concept of change over time elementary. Context Historians who excel at the art of storytelling often rely heavily upon context. Causality Notes
Literature and Latte - Scrivener Writing Software | Mac OS X | Windows “The biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.” —Michael Marshall Smith Grow your ideas in style Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft. Your complete writing studio Writing a novel, research paper, script or any long-form text involves more than hammering away at the keys until you’re done. Write, structure, revise Scrivener puts everything you need for structuring, writing and editing long documents at your fingertips. With access to a powerful underlying text engine, you can add tables, bullet points, images and mark up your text with comments and footnotes. Create order from chaos Your research—always within reach Getting it out there Compile your draft into a single document for printing or exporting * Requires KindleGen. Need More?
Statues are not the issue. These are ‘history wars’, a battle over the past | David Olusoga | Opinion As a teenager growing up in Newcastle, I played a small role in a long campaign of attrition waged by my generation against the city council. Our single objective was to ensure that by the end of each weekend the statues of central Newcastle all had a traffic cone on their heads, or had been made to look silly in some other way. As well as providing them with traffic cone hats (the classic), we balanced empty beer bottles on the outstretched hands of those statues striking heroic poses. Each week, the council would remove the traffic cones and clean up the monuments. It was not that we had any issue with George Stephenson, or with any of the other figures from the past whom the good people of the city had chosen to memorialise. In Charlottesville a young woman was killed while protesting against white supremacists who, alongside groups of neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan, chose a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee as the rallying point for their gathering.
America's History in the Making — Historical Thinking Skills Interactives This series of interactive activities introduces and models the Historical Thinking Skills defined by the National Center for History in the Schools. The interactives each model a specific skill or set of skills, such as analyzing historical artifacts or using primary sources to develop a thesis. The first five interactives conclude with "Classroom Extensions," which give teachers hints on how they can teach using these skills in their classrooms. The final interactive, Balancing Sources, includes input from our advisory board of teachers, modeling how they might use the primary sources within the interactive. These interactives require that cookies and JavaScript be enabled in your browser. Internet Explorer on Macintosh is not supported at this time. Launch Placing Artifacts in Time This interactive focuses on the concept of Chronological Thinking. This interactive should take 20-30 minutes to complete. Analyzing Artifacts Reading Maps Evaluating Evidence Curating an Exhibit Balancing Sources
Revision Tips How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato plants on their clothes. The flowers were part of an attempt to persuade French farmers to plant and French diners to eat this strange new species. Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. About 250 million years ago, the world consisted of a single giant landmass now known as Pangaea. Compared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive. Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. Equally important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture—the so-called agro-industrial complex.
The Best Fun Videos About Books & Reading I’m sure there are plenty of fun videos out there about books and reading, and I hope readers will point me in the direction of others besides the ones on this list. You might also be interested in A Collection Of The Best “Laugh While You Cry” Videos about teaching. I’ve used the videos on this list both as “discussion starters” and as fun ways to end a class when I have a few minutes of “extra” time left: Here’s the famous “Gotta Keep Reading” video from Ocoee Middle School: Here’s what books do at night when we’re not looking: Here’s a fun combination of library scenes from movies and TV shows: “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. …place in a world where books are living creatures. Here it is: Here’s a Rube Goldberg machine that turns the pages of your newspaper: Here’s one on organizing a bookcase: Book Dominoes: A maze grows in London is a Washington Post slideshow and Artists create maze using 250,000 books is a CBS News slideshow — both about the same event.