Standard 5-Paragraph Essay Template (Especially useful for practicing SAT Essays)

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ACT Essay Template

act_essay_template.docx
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Academic To-Do/Due List

academic_todo_due_list.xlsx
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Detailed 3-Day Planner/To-Do List

3_day_schedule_template.xlsx
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THE REFERENCE GUIDE PORTION OF THIS PAGE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION. CHECK BACK SOON!

& in the meantime, check out the list of latin and greek prefixes, roots, and suffixes below

Become a vocabulary expert, for the SAT and beyond:

Instead of trying to memorize thousands upon thousands of words, which you are likely to forget as soon as the test is over, learn just a few pages of common Latin and Greek roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Download this file for an extensive chart of all three.

suffixes_prefixes_roots.xlsx
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RESEARCH GUIDES
FINDING A TOPIC THAT EXCITES YOU
LOCATE & ASSEMBLE SOURCES FOR A RESEARCH PAPER
PRIMARY & SECONDARY SOURCES: WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW TO FIND THEM
ONLINE SOURCE MATERIAL: THE BEST & THE WORST
CITING YOUR SOURCES: MLA & CHICAGO BASICS
FOOTNOTES, ENDNOTES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES

WRITING GUIDES
WRITING PAPERS FOR LITERATURE CLASSES 
WRITING HISTORY: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE VS. RESEARCH PAPERS
OUTLINING YOUR PAPER TO DISCOVER YOUR ARGUMENT
EVERY PAPER NEEDS A THESIS/CENTRAL ARGUMENT
INTRODUCTIONS & CONCLUSIONS: PRIORITIZING
MAKING QUOTATIONS WORK FOR YOU (in the early stages of research, feel free to be liberal in your identification of what is important. For historians (and other non-literary scholars), you start reading material/doing research, you will find that the things that seem the most relevant are certain aspects of an argument that help to cement what you are trying to say. These passages resonate because they bear on what you are already thinking about, and they deploy and organize those ideas in a coherent and revelatory way. However, once you articulate your own position, you will find that it is important to be able to restate other people's opinions in your own words; the best quotations do not simply restate your argument, but provide  support for its underlying assumptions.---------the mechanics of using quotations in academic quotations within sets of quotations, comma placement,  writing: block quotations; and quotations housed within the text. (when to preface a quotation with a colon vs with a comma, or simply as its own sentence.).......never begin or end a paragraph with a quotation. There are exceptions to this rule; it isn't uncommon to open or end a paper with a quotation, but if you are using a quotation within the body of the text, you need to think about how you want it to function. This happens differently for different people. Sometimes, you will find a piece of information or a particular phrase early enough in the process that you end up crafting the paper around the quotation(s) themselves; in that case, it is important to be careful that your interpretation of a quotation is not overly colored by your own ideas.   If you are writing a paper for a lit class, which often takes a single piece of literature as a source, the process of identifying quotations is both more and less complex. If you read articles about a book, or reviews of a text, you will find that commentators often isolate the same quotations, or make note of the same scene to sharpen a description. Finding quotations that support your argument is not as easy as it sounds, and it requires a variety of skills: are you interpreting the quotation correctly? what does it mean, literally? what does it mean in the context of the book? how does it inform your reading of the book?
REVISION/EDITING: HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF AND WHEN TO ASK FOR HELP

GRAMMAR/ENGLISH LANGUAGE GUIDES
USING COMMAS, COLONS & SEMICOLONS LIKE A PRO: it drives me nuts when people say things like this, but i love grammar, because it usually makes perfect sense. my father, who is an accomplished surgeon, likes to say that he loves organic chemistry because it made perfect sense to him. I mean something a little different. All of us are accustomed to using words; daily life doesn't really let us avoid it. Most grammar rules and punctuation reflect natural speech patters. 9 out of ten times, if there is something wrong with a sentence, you will be able to hear it just by reading it aloud to yourself. the problem, at that point, may be that you have no idea how to make the sentence right. You can learn to use commas correctly simply by listening to how you would say something. We set off clauses in daily life all the time
COMMONLY MISPLACED ADVERBS AND PREPOSITIONS
THAT VS. WHICH(IN technical terms, that should be used with a restrictive clause, whereas which should be used  with a nonrestrictive clause. The removal of a restrictive clause would change the meaning of a sentence, whereas a nonrestrictive clause can be removed without altering the fundamental meaning of the sentence. 
THE THESAURUS: ANY WRITER'S BEST FRIEND