Understanding the Online
Writing Lab (OWL)
Barbara Ohrstrom, Project Manager CPS Writing Labs
b.ohrstrom@neu.edu
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What is the Online Writing Lab?
Your WRITING LAB 1 Credit course accompanies your
ENGLISH courses so that you may receive thorough
support and strategic advise to improve your writing.
The Writing Lab requires you to:
• Post drafts by their due dates.
• Fill out your Intake Form through an online link.
• View Writing Lab Instructor’s letters of analysis to you.
• Revise/edit those same drafts.
• Post your final essay in your ENGLISH course.
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After writing and posting your draft,
you begin your work with the Writing
Lab Instructor by assessing your
writing on an Intake Form.
The Intake Form is the beginning of a conversation about
moving a piece of writing forward through a series of
revisions and edits.
The Writing Lab Instructor carefully reviews what you say
about your writing before responding with revision
strategies and feedback.
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The Intake Form asks you to assess the
five most important characteristics of
good writing.
• Focus
Paragraph Organization
• Development
Sentence Mechanics
• Rhetorical Structure
Your Writing Lab Instructor will help you develop
your skills in all those areas.
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Focus: The Symphony of Meaning
All writing needs to be focused. This means three things:
• Topic: Focus narrow and deep!
• Thesis statement: This single sentence in your first
paragraph presents your argument.
• Your entire essay supports your argument: just
as an incorrectly plucked violin string shatters the
harmony of a symphony, an unrelated idea shatters the
harmony of ideas making up your focus.
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Development Supports Focus
• The Writing Lab instructor will help you work
with your development and critical thinking.
• Writers use facts, memories, details, examples,
illustrations and investigation to develop focus.
• The facts, memories, details, examples,
illustrations you develop create your symphony
of ideas and supports your argument.
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Structure (Rhetorical Arrangement)
• Your Writing Lab Instructor will know how to
help you arrange your ideas.
• Writers arrange their essays into various rhetorical
forms; e.g.,: cause and effect, process, narrative,
descriptive, definition, analogy, illustration,
example…
• Writers can also organize their work chronologically,
least to most important, most to least important, general
to specific, spatially…
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The Job of the Paragraph!
• Each paragraph contains one, and only one, idea
stated in a topic sentence.
• That idea needs to be supported with reasons,
evidence, numbers, names, statistics, details
and/or examples.
• The sentences within each paragraph need to be
organized to support the idea of paragraph.
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The Art and Grace of the SENTENCE!
• Sentences can need correction of grammatical
errors.
• However, writers also line edit sentences to
make them convey their meaning with style—no
errors have been made, but stylistic changes can
make a good essay into a great essay.
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The Writing Lab is for You
The OWL Writing Lab Instructors are professional writers
themselves, and as such, know writing strategies and
tools to help improve not just one essay, but all writing.
They will give you strategies and tools so that you do a lot
more than “correct errors.” You learn strategies to revise
and editing any and all writing you do.
This Writing Lab is unique to Northeastern and provides
professional writing support to students—the same kind
of writing support given to authors, journalists, and
others who make their living through words.
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