Blog Due 3/19

Both Duke University´s Thompson Writing Program ¨Short Guides to Writing for Specific Disciplines¨ and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill´s ¨The Writing Center¨ boast many valuable resources available to students during the writing process. However, Duke University´s writing guide is geared more towards a specific subject or discipline. For example, if you are writing a history paper and need help, Duke University´s website would provide the best guidance. On the other hand, The University of Carolina at Chapel Hill´s guide is a bit more general, focusing on the entirety of an essay. This writing guide has two columns titled "Writing the Paper" and "Citation, Style, and Sentence Level Concerns" which have essential material that one should look over when writing a paper in college. The Writing Center, created by University of North Carolina, has a third and fourth column titled "Specific Writing Assignments/Contexts" and "Writing for Specific Fields" respectively. The third column provides help when writing a business letter, a resume, a report, etc. I found this very helpful, because even though we might have been taught the formats and how to write these types of writing some time along high school, we definitely need to how to write these specific forms of documents if we want to be taken seriously by our professors and potential employers. The fourth column is similar to Duke University's Thompson Writing Program. It bestows multiple handouts on different subjects, such as philosophy, drama, and history. I also found this very helpful because it explicitly tells you how to build a dissertation and argue it in order to persuade the audience in the writer's favor. Because the Duke University Thompson Writing program is tailored to a specific audience looking for help in a definitive topic, I believe that it provides crucial guidance to a person writing about a topic within the Arts or Sciences department. Once you click on a certain topic, such as Communications or Drama, you are directed to a type of handout that has a great amount of information, all the way from helping the student understand their assignment to helping them select a topic. While these guides intend to help those writing about a distinct discipline, any student can skim through all the guides and retrieve valuable information that may help him or her write their paper. After exploring through both Duke University's Thompson Writing Program and The University of Carolina at Chapel Hill's Writing Center and the writing guides they have to offer, I will definitely keep them on hand the next time I have to write an essay for any of my classes. Both websites provide quality information that will help any college student having a rough time writing a college paper. Even if a student feels confident about his or her writing, I would still suggest consulting these two handy websites on their next assignment. Even though both websites grant some of the same information and some that is distinct from one another, I admit that both sites possess worthy counsel that will do nothing but improve one's writing abilities.