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EOU Online Writing Lab (OWL)

OWL Submission

  1. Please register before submitting drafts.
  2. Register only once for the school year.
  3. Submit  your draft to the OWL.
  4. Submit a revised draft of an earlier submission to the OWL.

Important: Submit drafts of capstones or other long documents in parts (max. 7 pages). Submit early so that there is time for a tutor to respond to all parts by your deadline.

OWL Response

  1. Allow 72 hours response time.
  2. Drafts submitted between Thursday noon and 8 a.m. Monday morning will be considered Monday submissions.
    1. If you do not receive a response to your draft after 72 hours of submission plus weekend waiting time, check your Spam file before emailing us at writelab@eou.edu. (Sometimes our firewall will stop a submission because of words it flags in the subject line or in your Spam file. Your draft simply will not get through.)
    2. Please note that in the response, the computer will translate some punctuation, such as apostrophes and quotation marks, into code/numbers. The document is still readable; just ignore the symbols or numbers.

OWL Policies

  • Online Writing Lab (OWL) services are for online and on-site students only.  On-campus students should schedule appointments with Writing Center tutors. Face-to-face tutoring is the most effective choice when it is available.
  • Research shows that good writers rarely work in isolation, but instead seek responses to works-in-progress. We are here to provide student writers feedback at each point their writing process, from getting started to finding a focus, developing ideas, improving organization, or helping writers to find and correct their own errors.
  • Both online and on-campus writing tutors are trained to comment first on conceptual and structural issues often called “global issues” or “higher order concerns” (HOCs) before they comment on conventions and correctness called “local issues” or “lower order concerns” (LOCs).  Consequently, student writers might expect that the tutor’s comments will primarily be about the focus of the piece, the supporting details, and organization.
  • Our goal is to help student writers learn how to improve their own drafts.  Tutors will comment on issues of convention and correctness (spelling, grammar, punctuation) if there are obvious patterns of error, but they will not correct students’ essays for them. 
  • The OWL is not an editing or proofreading service. The writer owns the paper, and the tutor is only a part of a writer’s process.
  • Students, and the faculty for whom they write, should have reasonable expectations of what a writing tutor can accomplish in a half-hour session.

If you have questions, please contact us at writelab@eou.edu.