DeVry Writing Center: Essential Writing Skills

Information on adjusting to college-level communication will be added soon!

As one of the most difficult activities humans face, writing isn't truly easy for anyone. Additionally, English is one of the most complex languages. If English is not your first language, or if you experience learning disabilities, these resources may support your success.

Understanding new words is the first step toward being able to use them. Learn strategies for expanding your vocabulary here.

Grammar involves making meaning out of words, phrases, and clauses. Building sentences with a strong structure leads to easy reading.

Check out Grammar Bytes for fun, interactive rules, videos, exercises and more!

Punctuation guides readers as they look for meaning in your words and phrases. Like road signs, punctuation tells readers when an idea comes to a stop (period = full stop), when ideas shift (commas are like yellow caution signs), or when two ideas connect (commas, semicolons and colons can work like like merge signs). Learning to punctuate properly makes reading easy and improves your professionalism.

Mechanics refers to the technical rules of writing. As with usage, the rules of mechanics can seem arbitrary, and they can change over time. Following current standard expectations for the community with which you are communicating adds polish and professionalism to your writing. Mechanics includes rules for:

Word choice

Spelling

Capitalization

Numbers

Abbreviations

Resources for each will be added soon!

You can memorize every rule of grammar, punctuation, and mechanics, but guess what? Those rules may change!

"Proper" usage is defined by what people in a certain time or place decide is correct.

• The "Oxford comma" has waxed and waned in popularity.
• "Data" and "group" are sometimes considered plural, but they are often "properly" used as singular nouns.
• Musicians of the 1980s introduced the expressions "diss" and "props," and Paris Hilton popularized a new meaning for "That's hot" in the 2000s.
• The normally plural "they" pronoun was accepted in the late 2010s as the correct way to refer to a person whose gender is unknown or a person who is non-binary. However, "they" was used as a singular pronoun as long ago as 1375.

Language is a living thing that constantly evolves. People make up new words every day, and if they become widely used, they are accepted and entered into the dictionaries. As people start to use language differently and that new usage spreads, experts adjust the rules to reflect the new normal.