CPP STORIES

New APA Writing Tool Will Help Students and Faculty

JFK Library Utilizing Academic Writer

by Brynne Irish

Academic Writer is an online American Psychological Association (APA) Style writing platform that will soon be available to faculty and students through EWU Libraries. Library Professor Liya Deng shared that this is a “digital teaching and learning tool that has been used by many academic institutions. It combines advanced writing and content management technology, and it is fully integrated with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, used in social sciences.” With the support from EWU’s School of Psychology, our library was able to acquire this resource for faculty and students in the disciplines that use the APA Style.

Liya Deng also highlighted the comprehensive guidance Academic Writer offers to help students master the APA style and scholarly writing in general. As a result, “faculty members now have more time to focus on teaching their core discipline in the classroom. The platform’s integration with Canvas courses allows instructors to integrate these resources directly, enabling students to learn at their own pace and apply their knowledge more effectively.”

In addition to the time-saving benefits for faculty, Academic Writer also offers student-specific tools, one of them being the “Writing Center”, which provides structured templates for the most common research paper formats. The paper templates guide students step-by-step through proper formatting of title pages, fonts, margins, and more! This will give students more time to focus on their ideas and writing itself.

Faculty member, Dr. Kevin Criswell from the School of Psychology shared his experience using Academic Writer:

I was skeptical of the use of APA’s Academic Writer when I first heard about and began using it. However, I quickly understood the great potential the platform provided to facilitate students’ critical thinking, application, and learning throughout the academic writing and research process.

He also expressed that “the platform can take students from the very beginning of asking important questions about an area of research they are interested in, using open-ended prompts within Academic Writer. From there, students can take their own answers to prompts, develop more specific research questions, and funnel that work into an APA style paper that they can connect their responses directly to.”

With the integration of Academic Writer into EWU’s Library resources, both students and faculty gain a valuable tool that simplifies the academic writing process. Faculty will now have more time to focus on their core teaching, while students will benefit from structured guidance in mastering APA style and conducting research. The introduction of Academic Writer will soon be a significant step toward supporting academic excellence at EWU and beyond.

EWU Libraries is currently offering one-hour, online workshops for faculty. Workshops geared toward student use will be offered in spring quarter 2025.