The Center for Writing & Learning (CWL), located in Howarth 109, offers students opportunities to get help on all aspects of the writing process.  Services include:

• Writing Advisors who are selected through a rigorous application process and who are specially trained to help students get started on a paper, organize their thoughts, or improve their editing skills.
• Peer Tutors in a wide range of subjects who are nominated by professors in their disciplines and who are specially trained to help students individually or in small groups.
• Language Partners who work with multilingual students to help them navigate the conventions and quirks of academic English writing.
• Academic Consultants who are specially trained to help students improve their time management skills, organization, study skills, and test-taking strategies.

Sound Writing is the official writing handbook on campus, written by student writing advisors and specifically tailored to the needs of Puget Sound students and their faculty.

In addition to supporting the development of successful academic writing skills, Sound Writing also includes sections on research methods, writing in the disciplines, and more.

Sound Writing provides help with three citation styles: MLA, APA, and Chicago (notes & bibliography).

Current Edition: 2020

• Always list the author names in the order in which they appear on the paper. Researchers carefully determine the order of authorship on a paper, and you need to preserve it to ensure that the article is recognizable, findable, and fairly credited.
• Note that all author names are listed as first initials and last names. Even if you know the whole first name, the Ecology format dictates that using initials only in the Literature Cited list. Note also that the first name is given last name first, then intitials and any additional authors are listed intitials first, then last name.
  
  • Note that there are spaces between the initials.
• Note that the journal name is written out completely. In older issues of Ecology, citations included bold font for volume number of journal articles. In recent issues, the volume number has not been bolded. Note that issue numbers for journal articles are not listed.
• Always italicize species names.

For this course, do not directly quote from the literature.Using quotes is not customary in scientific writing. Instead, use your references to support and contextualize your clains. References in scientific writing are used to:

• put your study in context with other work done in the field (e.g., similar work on other organisms or in other habitats)
• show the accepted use of study methods (e.g., show that other people have used the same methods with success)
• incorporate ideas generated by other research (e.g., perhaps another researcher encountered something similar in their study and they suggested a possible reason for their results)