1

Understanding the Online Writing Lab (OWL)Barbara Ohrstrom, Project Manager CPS Writing Labs

b.ohrstrom@neu.edu

2

What is the Online Writing Lab?

Your WRITING LAB 1 Credit course accompanies your ENGLISH courses so that you may receive thorough support and strategic advise to improve your writing.

The Writing Lab requires you to:• Post drafts by their due dates.• Fill out your Intake Form through an online link.• View Writing Lab Instructor’s letters of analysis

to you.• Revise/edit those same drafts.• Post your final essay in your ENGLISH course.

After writing and posting your draft, you begin your work with the Writing Lab Instructor by assessing your writing on an Intake Form.

The Intake Form is the beginning of a conversation about moving a piece of writing forward through a series of revisions and edits.

The Writing Lab Instructor carefully reviews what you say about your writing before responding with revision strategies and feedback.

3

The Intake Form asks you to assess the five most important characteristics of good writing.• Focus Paragraph

Organization

• Development Sentence Mechanics

• Rhetorical Structure

Your Writing Lab Instructor will help you develop your skills in all those areas.

4

Focus: The Symphony of Meaning

All writing needs to be focused. This means three things:

• Topic: Focus narrow and deep!

• Thesis statement: This single sentence in your first paragraph presents your argument.

• Your entire essay supports your argument: just as an incorrectly plucked violin string shatters the harmony of a symphony, an unrelated idea shatters the harmony of ideas making up your focus. 5

Development Supports Focus

• The Writing Lab instructor will help you work with your development and critical thinking.

• Writers use facts, memories, details, examples, illustrations and investigation to develop focus.

• The facts, memories, details, examples, illustrations you develop create your symphony of ideas and supports your argument.

6

Structure (Rhetorical Arrangement)• Your Writing Lab Instructor will know how

to help you arrange your ideas.

• Writers arrange their essays into various rhetorical forms; e.g.,: cause and effect, process, narrative, descriptive, definition, analogy, illustration, example…

• Writers can also organize their work chronologically, least to most important, most to least important, general to specific, spatially…

7

The Job of the Paragraph!

• Each paragraph contains one, and only one, idea stated in a topic sentence.

• That idea needs to be supported with reasons, evidence, numbers, names, statistics, details and/or examples.

• The sentences within each paragraph need to be organized to support the idea of paragraph.

8

The Art and Grace of the SENTENCE!

• Sentences can need correction of grammatical errors.

• However, writers also line edit sentences to make them convey their meaning with style—no errors have been made, but stylistic changes can make a good essay into a great essay.

9

The Writing Lab is for YouThe OWL Writing Lab Instructors are professional

writers themselves, and as such, know writing strategies and tools to help improve not just one essay, but all writing.

They will give you strategies and tools so that you do a lot more than “correct errors.” You learn strategies to revise and editing any and all writing you do.

This Writing Lab is unique to Northeastern and provides professional writing support to students—the same kind of writing support given to authors, journalists, and others who make their living through words.

10