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Simpson Writing Center
From your first paper to final capstone, we'll help you do the write thing
In-Person Writing Center
Mary Berry Hall, Rm 109 and 111 | Sunday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 9 p.m.
The Simpson Writing Center (SWC) offers individualized assistance to all Simpson students across every discipline. We’re here to help you with any form of written, oral, visual, or electronic (WOVE) communication.
From brainstorming and organizing ideas to revising and polishing drafts, the SWC guides you through all stages of the composing process. Our team of writing consultants will help you assess and develop your own work in a highly collaborative process.
Online Writing Lab (OWL)
In addition to in-person consulting sessions, the SWC also offers convenient virtual assistance through our Online Writing Lab (OWL).
How it works
- Select an appointment from the available time slots.
- Upload your document for an OWL consultant to read and annotate.
- The consultant will send you an OWL Report of your session. The report will include a list of items you wanted to work on, your document with annotations and comments, and a closing note.
Do I have to do anything or go anywhere during my appointment slot?
Nope! You can sit back and relax. The appointment slots just show when your consultant is online and available to work on your document. You can upload your materials at any time leading up to the appointment time.
How quickly will I receive my OWL Report?
Immediately following your appointment slot, your consultant will send you an email with the OWL Report.
Documentation Styles
The MLA, or Modern Language Association, style of citing sources within a paper is used primarily by writers in the humanities (English, foreign language, history, philosophy, and religion).
Helpful MLA Source Citing Tips
- When using the MLA style of documentation, cite sources used within your text by placing the last name of the author(s) and the corresponding page number(s) (if available) in parentheses after a direct or an indirect quote (Jones 3).
- It is not necessary to place a comma between the last name of the author and the page number, nor is it necessary to use “p.” etc. before the page number.
- If the author is unknown, place the title of the document in parentheses instead (How to Cite Internet Sources 3).
- In addition to citing sources within your paper in this manner, you need to create a works cited page which lists all of the publication information for the sources you used in alphabetical order.
Additional Information:
MLA Style (provided by Purdue University Online Writing Lab)
The APA, or American Psychological Association, style of documentation is used primarily by writers in the social sciences (economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology).
Helpful APA Tips
- When using the APA style to document sources, place the last name of the author(s) in parentheses with the year of publication (Jones, 1996) after both direct and indirect quotes. Place a comma between the author’s last name and the year.
- Page numbers should also be included after the year of publication for direct quotes, although they are optional for indirect quotes (Jones, 1996, p. 28). Place a comma between the year and the page number.
- If the author of the document you are citing is not known, replace the author’s last name with the title of the document (“The Internet as a Research Tool,” 1997, p. 4).
- In addition to citing sources within your paper in this manner, you need to create a works cited page which lists all of the publication information for the sources you used in alphabetical order.
Additional information:
APA Style (provided by the American Psychological Association)
APA Style (provided by Purdue University Online Writing Lab)
The Turabian, or Chicago, style of documentation incorporates the use of either endnotes or footnotes.
Helpful Turabian-Chicago Tips
- When using the Turabian style of documentation to cite sources, place a superscript number after each quotation, paraphrase, or summary.1 Citations are numbered in order throughout your paper, and each citation must be accompanied by a numbered note containing publication information about the source you are using. This information can be contained in either endnotes at the end of your paper on a separate page or in footnotes at the bottom of the page within your paper.
- Although the endnotes or footnotes in your paper contain all of the publication information necessary to verify or retrieve your citation, you may also include a bibliography (an alphabetized list of sources used) at the end of your paper. Ask your professor if they would like both endnotes or footnotes and a bibliography if you are unsure about whether to include one with your paper.
- If you do include a bibliography with your paper, it will differ from your endnotes or footnotes in three ways:
- the authors’ names are inverted (the last name of the author is first, followed by the first name),
- the elements of entries are separated by periods,
- and the first line of each entry is flush with the left margin, with subsequent lines indented five spaces.
Additional Information:
Turabian Style (The University of Chicago Press)
Presentations and Workshops
Our writing center director or writing consultants will be happy to visit your classroom, organization or meeting and deliver a presentation or workshop on a topic of your choice — at no cost.
Please give the SWC at least a week before your desired date. If you want to modify a current presentation or suggest a new one, please contact the Writing Center Director.
Already know which presentation or workshop you are interested in? Click here to schedule now.
Duration: (10-20 min. presentation)
About: What are the Simpson Writing Center and the Online Writing Lab, and how can they help your students? This presentation is ideal for first-semester freshmen, transfer students, or returning Simpson Online students who might not be familiar with Simpson’s resources.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: This workshop provides an overview of the citation formats in a given course. The session will cover the basics of in-text and reference page formatting, when to cite, common citation signal phrases, and pros and cons of common citation generators.
Can be combined with the plagiarism presentation.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: SWC consultants Angel Schewe (’25), Anna Schewe (’25), and Kaya Young (’24) developed this presentation to answer a simple question: why do writers procrastinate? After students read together a New York Times article offering several solutions, students will reflect on intersecting areas of their lives that may be influencing their academic procrastination. Students will then come up with a game plan to get back on track.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: Why does U.S. higher education care so much about citing sources? Academic integrity in college is more stringent than high school, and the SWC will reveal some of the contextual factors that make plagiarism a confusing issue for students, an alarming concern for instructors, and an ethical dilemma for administrators. This presentation covers the most common forms of plagiarism and the reasons students resort to it. Students will also have the opportunity to engage in fun ethical scenarios during the session.
Can be combined with the citations and references presentation.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50-90 min. presentation, depending on depth of drafting)
About: This presentation is both informative and generative. It teaches students about conventional and novel ways to come up with ideas for an assignment, while also putting them through an innovative (and highly effective) brainstorming session. This presentation was developed by Morgan Kerkman (’24), Alyssa Love (’23), and Kalen Stefanick (’24).
NOTE: This presentation is best delivered before the “Revising Your Thesis Statement” or “Building a Research Paper from a Single Source” presentations. Those are both meant to help students revise and build on work they’ve already done, whereas this presentation is meant to help students start from scratch.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: In this interactive workshop, students will learn strategies for revising and refining their thesis statements to produce clear, focused arguments in their academic essays and research papers. The presentation covers:
- Identifying the core elements of an effective thesis statement (topic, position, reasons)
- Evaluating if a thesis is too broad, boring, or narrow for the scope of the paper
- Understanding the reader’s perspective and involving them in the revision process
Through examples, activities, and discussion, students will gain skills for crafting thesis statements that are precise, arguable, defensible, and aligned with the evidence in their writing.
Disclaimer: This presentation is not about how to build a thesis from scratch. (For those desiring that assistance, please request the Brainstorming Sprint workshop instead.) The Revising Your Thesis Statement presentation is for writers who have already finished a first draft and need to refine their projects.
Duration: (50 min. workshop)
About: Writers will be led through Peter Elbow’s stream-of-consciousness freewriting exercise. The process is very simple, and students will spend the majority of the session writing. This presentation can be used as a brainstorming exercise right after students receive an assignment, or it can be nestled at the end of a research assignment, such as an annotated bibliography.
If you are looking for a comprehensive brainstorming and topic generation exercise, please see the “Brainstorming Sprint” presentation, which involves academic research, drafting, and planning next steps.
The SWC will adapt the presentation to your assignment, so please send the assignment sheet to the writing center director.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup. All writers should have pen/paper or computer for writing.
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: This presentation teaches students the “you only need one article” method of undergraduate source finding. The crux of this presentation centers on shifting a writer’s perspective from “I’m writing on topic X” to “I’m entering into the conversation on topic X.” Scholars write in conversation with other academics, and this mindset is the key to knowing how to research in college. By using one source, the article’s citations, and Google Scholar’s “cited by” feature, students can create robust and coherent bibliographies that reliably address a common academic conversation. Finally, we conclude with some caveats, tips, and tricks.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: Most academic articles or books were not written for students, yet they are asked to cite these credible sources in their papers. This session will help students develop reading strategies for academic articles, such as pre-reading strategies, how to identify key arguments, note-taking strategies, resource storage and organization, and drafting short annotations for later use.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: This presentation will teach students how to structure an argumentative paper at the outline level, focusing on the “create a research gap” technique of narrowing sources down to an intriguing area of uncertainty in the literature. Students will recap what they should know about paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting, but we will also talk about ways to maintain a clear voice and argument amidst external sources. Finally, we will practice using two short opposing perspectives focused on integrating quotations into an argument.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (20-30 min. presentation)
About: Most people — from tenured faculty down to first-year freshmen — struggle to create consistent writing schedules for themselves. This presentation synthesizes faculty development training on how to maintain a writing schedule for students, and it teaches students the common barriers to writing, how to “pay yourself first” in productivity, and the power of writing for 30 minutes a day.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: 50 min. presentation)
About: In this presentation, students learn that revising based on feedback is chiefly an issue of motivation and secondarily an issue of divination. In other words, it takes a lot of effort to take critical feedback, and sometimes the comments aren’t clear to the writer. The presentation also dives into the value of readers and how to prepare for instructor office hours.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (10-20 min. presentation)
About Grammarly at Simpson: Grammarly is a spelling, grammar, and usage automated feedback tool. All Simpson students, faculty, and staff have access to a free Grammarly Premium account, which they can access by logging in to Grammarly using their Simpson credentials.
About this presentation: As useful as this tool is, any algorithm will have blind spots and biases, and Grammarly has several limitations that Simpson users should know. This presentation will cover the basics of how to get the most out of Grammarly, as well as when not to use or rely on Grammarly. The biggest takeaway? If you have to think, turn Grammarly off.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. workshop)
About: Should students learn to cite? Yes. But should citing and managing sources be a laborious process every single time a student writes a paper? Not in the Writing Center’s opinion. Zotero is a free and open-source reference management software, which means users can store citations (including files, such as PDFs of articles and books), take notes and make tags across sources, and cite those sources automagically in all major word processor apps (e.g., MS Word, Pages, Google Docs, and more). This workshop helps participants set up their Zotero library, download their first sources, and explore how to cite in their word processing app.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup. Participants should download Zotero and bring their own computers to the workshop.
Duration: (50 min. workshop)
About: Obsidian is a free, open-source note taking tool that embraces the Zettelkasten method of note taking. Basically, Zettlekasten is all about linking ideas together to show unexpected connections over time. At its simplest, anyone (students, staff, and instructors) can use Obsidian as any other note app; at its best, a person can create a second brain of networks across sources, disciplines, years, and more. This workshop demonstrates the basics of digital note taking and some of the most effective note taking strategies with Obsidian.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup. Participants should download Obsidian in preparation for the presentation.
Duration: (50 min. workshop)
About: About 70 percent of Simpson students graduate and enter industry rather than graduate school. Most people in intellectual industries, from finance and insurance to advertising and engineering, have begun using AI tools for productivity, idea generation, and proofreading. This presentation teaches students several different powerful ways to help them write — from ideation to completion — with ChatGPT or Grammarly Go. Students will learn Simpson’s policies, common limitations of AI, and basics of prompt engineering.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup. Students should also have created an account with openai to utilize ChatGPT. Depending on the class, they may also be given institutional access to Grammarly GO.
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: The How to Write series unveils the often mysterious features of a written genre. The personal statement genre is one of the highest-stakes and confusing documents applicants will face. On the one hand, they are often asked to talk about themselves and not what is in their resume/CV, but on the other, they must demonstrate a curated and professional version of themselves that reveals some desirable skill or competency. Worse, the genre is ever-changing. This presentation will give writers the latest advice on how to succeed at this document.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: The How to Write series unveils the often mysterious features of a writing genre. In the STEM Reports or Articles presentation, writers will learn the purposes and strategies of Introductions, Methods, Results, and Conclusions.
This presentation is highly detailed and should be reserved for students a) preparing research articles, b) planning on attending grad school in a STEM field, or c) heading into a STEM internship where they may be working on research teams. Students should have some experience with writing lab reports or process reports.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
Duration: (50 min. presentation)
About: Prepping for a conference? Have a presentation in class? Need to share your internship experience with your bosses? This presentation covers the basics of visual design, visual aid usability rules, and tasteful PowerPoint style tips.
Technology needs: Projector and laptop hookup
