Editing the Writing Guide

Every group of students is different; what our students want or need to know may be different from what your students need. Rather than try to make a Guide that covers every possibility, we published the Guide (under the terms of a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license) so that instructors can edit, extend or modify it to fit their particular needs and requirements.

All source files and images are available from the Stem Writing Project's GitHub repository for this sub-project.

Localizing the Guide For Your Students

The workflow for adapting the Guide typically involves:

• Identifying what the most common writing errors are locally.
• If necessary, modifying the bins grading criteria.
• Deciding which general recommendations in the current Guide need to be revised to match local expectations.
• Replacing any generic pages in the shared Guide that duplicate local resources which already work well.
• Shortening or removing any components that local students do not need.

Not all of this work needs to (or should) be done up front. Revision will take a few semesters. Use students to help you; they are very good at finding contradictory information. They also can say what they need that is missing.

Available Resources