Evaluation of an Academic Website: The Dartmouth Writing Center

The website that I was assigned to evaluate is the Dartmouth Writing Program's website which is published and maintained by Dartmouth College. It is a helpful and instructive resource for students (students of the Humanities mainly), during the writing process. It is thorough in its deconstruction of the academic paper, and even speaks specifically of different types of academic papers and how to go about them.

Link 1: Writing the Academic Paper: Considering Structure and Organization.

Gocsik, Karen. Materials for Students: Considering Structure and Organization. Dartmouth College,2004. . September 22, 2010. Website

I find this link(like most of the links on the website) to be particularly helpful for those students who have not yet had to write an academic research paper and or those who may not have written successful papers in the past. I find that a challenging part of the writing process for me is often organizing my arguments in the most powerful way possible. Organizing one's paper is an ongoing process throughout and this link provides an exhaustive instructions/tips on how to prevent yourself from becoming lost in your secondary materials and your own thoughts. Particular steps I find to be of the utmost important that are meaningfully explained here are: creating an outline, providing evidence, using transitional markers, and keeping your writing coherent.

Link 2: Understanding Logic

Gocsik, Karen. Materials for Students: Logic and Argument. Dartmouth College, 2004. >. September 22, 2010. Website
At the very core of every academic paper, the writer's purpose is always to prove an argument. Proving an argument requires that you utilize (what may seem basic or inherent to you--with the latter I must disagree however) logic. As a student if philosophy (and logic enthusiast) I find this link to be great because it provides students methods and techniques for proving the thesis. I specifically think that the sections entitled "Avoiding Logical Fallacies" and "Understanding Formal Logic" as sections that provide concrete examples of how to be logical (and how not to be).

Link 3: Writing the Philosophy Paper

Bumpus, Ann. Materials for Students: Writing the Philosophy Paper. Dartmouth College, 2004. >. September 22, 2010. Website

I chose this particular link because it is of interest to me personally, but what is great about this website is that there are other particular articles about how to write a paper on film, English, history, etc. This I find to be extremely helpful for there are different approaches that one should take when assigned papers in other disciplines. It is especially useful for as students in university we are do occasionally find ourselves taking courses that are not in our particular field and which have a different discourse than we are used to.

I believe that this website is good for the class because I realize that there are students in the class who are not of the humanities and the articles which we are reading and the assignments (such as the annotated bibliography and the abstract) are not familiar to you if you are a science or economics major. This website I believe will prove to be useful for those who are not used to synthesizing outside sources (along with there own ideas) for the purpose of supporting a thesis statement. This website really breaks down every step of the writing process in succinct manner.


* Great Tip from this website
Read your paper out loud! I think this is the BEST advice for writing papers.
Also check out Students' Advice for Students