Online resource provides
writing aids
 By
Megan Finnerty
Features Editor
It's 2 a.m. The paper's due at 8:30 a.m. The roommates
are asleep, and even it they were awake, none of them know whether the
comma goes inside or outside the quotation marks.
There's only one place to go for help: www.owl.english.purdue.edu.
The Online Writing Lab, developed by the Purdue
University Writing Lab, is a convenient place to find more than 130
handouts explaining everything from revision, punctuation and parts
of speech. OWL also offers students an e-mail question and answer service,
practice worksheets and PowerPoint and hypertext workshops.
The internationally known site receives more than
3 million hits a year according to Geoff Stacks, a graduate student
and OWL coordinator.
He and the site's Web master, Erin Karper, a graduate
student, look for patterns in the types of requests they receive via
e-mail and then decide what to add to the site.
Tutors, professors and others who work in the writing
lab write the tutorials and offer suggestions for the various links
pages which can connect users to hundreds of writing Web sites.
Stacks said the site receives a slew of hits from
around the world because of its large English as a Second Language section.
"Our other two most popular sections are our MLA
and APA sections; there's a lot of people out their writing research
papers," he said.
Recently, he and Karper updated the professional
writing section of the site which includes tips and instructions for
writing resumes, memos and other job-related writing.
OWL is an extension of Purdue's Writing Lab, housed
in Heavilon Hall, where students go for personalized help.
Murial "Mickey" Harris, the lab's director, sees
OWL as another way the lab can reach students at every point during
the writing process.
"We can help students through any stage, even if
you don't know how to start," she said. "Everyone should have someone
who can help them."
Stacks said, "I think OWL is a good resource if
you want to learn things on your own. It's a place to go to learn about
commas at 3 in the morning when no one else is around.
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