Welcome to Writing Commons, the open-education home for writers. Our primary goal is to provide the resources college students need to improve their writing, research, and critical thinking.
We believe learning materials should be free for all students and teachers.
Writing Commons is a popular, open education resource. For 2012, Writing Commons was viewed by over 145,000 unique users--167,000 total users.
As illustrated by the Table of Contents, Writing Commons provides a comprehensive introduction to college-level writing: Writing Processes, Information Literacy, Research Processes, Collabortion, Genres, Style, New Media. An alternative to expensive print textbooks, Writing Commons can be used as a required textbook for a variety of college-level writing courses (First-Year Composition, Argument and Persuasion, Research and Writing, Business Writing, Writing for Engineers, and Creative Nonfiction).
Writing Commons follows a peer-review, crowd-sourcing process for future development. See Contribute to review the Guide for Authors and recent calls for webtexts. Submissions are reviewed by our Staff, Review Editors and Editorial Board. Webtexts pubished by Writing Commons are published under a Creative Commons 3.0 NC ND License. In addition, Writing Commons publishes works with permission and other pertinent resources published under open copyright licenses. For example, Common Comments, a partnership with the Writing Program at the University of South Florida, provides over 200 comments that can be inserted into students' papers via peer review or teacher review; these comments contain hyperlinks to articles and quizzes at Writing Commons, thereby enhancing response to student writing, ensuring students can better understand what their peers and teachers are telling them about by their writing.
Writing Commons was founded in 2008 by Joseph M. Moxley. A professor of English and director of first-year composition at the University of South Forida, Moxley serves as Publisher and Executive Editor (more).
Keep up with Writing Commons using your favorite social-media sites.
Writing Commons has its own Facebook site, where we keep our status and postings relevant to the latest site information, as well as news about the greater Open Education Resource community.
Writing Commons is also available on Twitter using @writingcommons and #writingcommons.
Writing Commons's tweets consist of answers to students' most common writing questions, such as "What's a paragraph supposed to have?" and "What's an argument, again?" Each tweet is hyper-linked to our Writing Commons blog, where Writing Commons staff provides succinct, accessible answers and helpful examples.
