Getting to know the OWL

The topic I would like to talk about today is Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab or OWL.  OWL is an excellent resource for any student but it has special utility in language arts. This website is open to the public and offers an enormous amount of information on writing, formatting, and citations.

The OWL originated as a resource for Purdue students but many of its features are accessible to the public.  When visiting the website there are links along the top as well as a sidebar.  The general public should most likely ignore the links along the top and focus on the sidebar as this is where all of the useful information lies.  Looking through the sidebar one will see links for General Writing, Research and Citations, Teacher and Tutor Resources, Subject-Specific Writing, and even ESL.  For this demonstration we will at the General Writing section.

The home page of the General Writing Resources displays a new set of sidebar links on the left as well as a brief description of what each link is.  For demonstration purposes we will click on Academic Writing and see where that brings us.

In the Academic Writing tab you will notice that once more there is a new sidebar with brief descriptions in the center of the page.  It is important to note that the shade of the sidebar links is meant to indicate how far you are in a section.  Under the search button we see the progression of how far into the OWL we have gone.

Clicking on Rhetorical Situations brings us to a new page with a similar same layout.  This time there is some more in depth information.  There is a primer on understanding Rhetoric as well as several videos by students on the subject.  Over on the sidebar there are white links which contain demonstrations, definitions, and several examples.  Some longer pages have short summaries in a small box at the top of the page which make finding specific content very easy.  There is also a short concluding page that ties this section together.

The OWL is a host to a number of other resources including it’s very popular citation and formatting guides.  These guides are most helpful because they do not do the formatting for you but just give helpful examples and explanations, which ultimately help the person using them learn the formatting for themselves.

Overall the OWL is an extremely informative and useful tool for students and teachers alike.  While it can most certainly be integrated into a lesson directly if a teacher has the creativity, it is perhaps most beneficial as a supplement to classroom instruction.  It may be productive to introduce the OWL to students at the beginning of a school year or semester and then refer back to it when necessary.  A teacher could also point students to the relevant sections of the OWL in the instructions of a project or assignment so that if they get stuck they will have a helpful tool right at their fingertips.