The Importance of Writing Clearly.

Aloha everyone - I hope you had a wonderful week back to school.

Because this is a Writing Intensive class, and because I care very much about your writing skills, I have made a few changes this semester to help you get the most out of our resources here at UHWO. Using the correct APA formatting for your paper is an easy way to earn points, or a silly way to lose them. You are always welcome to email me if there is any part of APA that is not clear - I know that it can be confusing and tricky, but there are tons of resources (myself included!) that can help. Please use the help, as your grades will be affected by your correct usage of APA.

For this second week, I want you to do a few things:

1. Reach out to your peer partner and say hi. Feel free to use each other as resources if you have any questions - your classmates can be great resources!
2. Please visit the No‘eau Writing Center's webpage and look around. Then, do the APA Style workshop activity to help better familiarize yourself with APA formatting. Because this is a Writing Intensive class, this information will be imperative to completing your assignments correctly. Once you have completed the activity, please pick one piece of information that you found to be the most helpful, and then write about it in your first blog posting. What did this slide tell you that you didn't already know? This will account for a portion of your grade for your first week's blog.
3. Next, once you have viewed the APA workshop, I want you to find the information about how to send your paper to them for feedback. You will have to submit at least one of your written assignments (not the Power Point) to the No‘eau Writing Center - it can be either of the two big papers. Once you submit your paper, please be sure to forward me email that you receive from them so that I can give you credit. This email/feedback will account for a portion of your grade for this class - if you do not send the paper into the Writing Center, you will not receive those points. Of course, you are welcome to submit both of your papers to the Writing Center, but you will only be graded on this once.
4. Go check out the OWL at Purdue website for APA. I receive a lot of papers that have issues that are quickly resolved by browsing this web page. If you are not already familiar with it, this is the perfect time to acquaint yourself with this resource. Go through all of the links on the side that talk about In-Text Citations, Reference Lists, as well as headings and seriation. All of these things will be used in your papers throughout the semester.

We use writing to convey our thoughts in this field - there are no tests to assess your knowledge. That is why it is incredibly important that your writing is clear and concise, uses strong language, and maintains an academic tone throughout. I want to focus on the content of your writing, not your formatting.

And, because this is a class about documentation and assessment, I want you to make your OWN learning visible throughout the semester in your blogs and in your assignments. By focusing on making your writing as strong as possible, together we'll be able to do just that!